fantasies drawn more real says a lot about what going on in his head
I allowed myself to get excited when I saw that there was an upcoming article to be published in the New Yorker titled, Life after Calvin.
It was reported to be look at the life of Bill Watterson in one of the few interviews the artist/writer/creator has granted since he stopped creating the Calvin and Hobbs comic strip.
I love Calvin and Hobbs or at least I really enjoy.
Much of it, for me, can be seen as biography.
Much of what Calvin thought, says and does sounds very familiar to me.
With much interest, I have been waiting for this article.
So it is here.
And I have read it.
And …
I am not sure what I wanted it to say.
But it sure didn’t say much.
I think the writer got one or two quotes and fleshed out a New Yorker profile.
I am reminded of something Jim Harrison said about giving interviews.
Mr. Harrison remarked that he could get through any interview by repeating any question back as a statement.
He didn’t have to think much.
And the writer was able to prove all their preconceived notions.
The was one take away thought, but it seems to have been said in some other interview.
The writer, one Rivka Galchen, writes, “Watterson has said, of the illustrations in “Calvin and Hobbes,” “One of the jokes I really like is that the fantasies are drawn more realistically than reality, since that says a lot about what’s going on in Calvin’s head.” Only one reality in “Calvin and Hobbes” is drawn with a level of detail comparable to the scenes of Calvin’s imagination: the natural world. The woods, the streams, the snowy hills the friends career off—the natural world is a space as enchanted and real as Hobbes himself.“
… the fantasies are drawn more realistically than reality, since that says a lot about what’s going on in Calvin’s head.
I like that.
I like that as I think I live that way to this day.
So I can find affirmation of my lifestyle.
As for Mr. Watterson?
In this article, I think there are more quotes from Calvin or Hobbs than from Mr. Watterson.
Maybe the title should have been, Life after Bill.
booksellers about as uncommercial breed of people possible
In a world gone crazy, when I am grasping at anything that points the compass in a positive direction, I found the recent article in the New York Times, Barnes & Noble Sets Itself Free ByMaureen O’Connor to be something of a word of hope.
To quote Big Bill or better to quote Portia in the Merchant of Venice, So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
Or maybe best to quote Willy Wonka and say, “So shines a good deed in a weary world.”
At least, for a moment, this story about how Barnes and Noble is pushing the chain to act more like the indie stores it was once notorious for displacing under the direction of a new CEO, James Daunt.
“The curious trick has been that if you actually let the local book-selling teams do what they think is best, you suddenly get much better bookstores,” Mr. Daunt said. Then he quickly added a caveat: “About a quarter of them become dramatically better, and a quarter become dramatically worse — but it is much easier to focus on that quarter and improve them.”
The change goes along with his strategy of embracing the mind-set of his typical employee. “Booksellers are about as uncommercial a breed of people as it’s possible to come across,” Mr. Daunt said. “The irony is that the less concerned we are with the commercial, the better it works commercially.
“You need to love books, and you need to know how our customers shop for books,” says a long term Barnes and Noble employee.
I read and I believe it, but only because I want to believe it.
I spent 12 years working for a chain bookstore.
For many employee’s it was a job.
For me and many employee’s and many of my good good friends that I worked with, it was a calling.
And it was a fight against those who went into it as business and tried to make it business while we tried to keep the faith.
So to read, “The curious trick has been that if you actually let the local book-selling teams do what they think is best, you suddenly get much better bookstores.” almost makes me want to cry.
I worked for Waldenbooks.
But I lived in Michigan.
If you loved books and you lived in the State of Michigan, at some point in your life you ended up at Border’s Book Store, a stand alone, independent love-affair with books in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
If you went down that path, you also at some point ended up at John King Used Books in Detroit but that’s another story.
Among booksellers in the State of Michigan, Border’s was the gold standard.
It had sofa’s and chairs and probably some sort of cafe before Starbucks.
They had a service desk set up and staffed by three people, in the pre computer era, who did nothing but researched hard to find titles so a customer could order the book.
They had floor upon floor of books.
The had an art print / map section and I still have prints on my office wall that I purchased there, using my grocery money instead of using my grocery money for groceries.
When I started with at my bookstore in a mall, I saw how it could embrace some of what Border’s was.
I fought for chairs in the store.
I fought for more and more copies of different books rather than 100 copies of the same bestseller.
We worked to create displays of content that meant something.
I started as a bookseller then assistant Manager and finally, Manager.
Though I used label tape and put the title, GUY IN CHARGE on my name tag.
One of the many, many things I did that got me trouble.
My battles can be kind of summed up when I made a display of books for Valentine’s Day.
Regardless of the topic or author, I took over a wall and made a display of every red book we had in the store.
My District Manager came in, took one look at Car Repair manuals next to Novels next to books on Knitting but ALL WITH RED COVERS surrounded by cardboard hearts and he ran back out to his car to get his camera.
“That’s the type of thinking we want to see Mike!,” he told me.
I banged a big red American Heritage dictionary against my head.
“This is Walden’s, Mike”, he would say, “Not Border’s.“
The really funny part of this story is that after I was asked to leave the employ of company, another long story, Walden’s relocated it’s headquarters from Stamford, CT to ANN ARBOR and then bought out Border’s and in an effort to change the brand, changed the name of the Company TO Border’s Books!
In the end I guess I won.
To read Booksellers are about as uncommercial a breed of people as it’s possible to come across is a tonic to my soul.
Some where I have a book, I think it’s an autographed copy of Lake Wobegone by Garrison Keillor.
It was picked up for me by a Waldenbooks Regional Vice President.
Her office was in Ann Arbor and I got to know her when I worked at the Walden’s in Ann Arbor when I was in College.
I was allowed to switch back and forth between Grand Rapids, where I lived and Ann Arbor.
I would have long talks with this VP on bookselling as a calling and she would explain bookselling as a business.
She knew I liked Keillor and arranged to get an autographed copy when he made an appearance at some other Walden’s.
Inscribed above the author’s autograph was this sentiment.
“To the most un-corporate person I know.”
And she signed it.
When James Thurber’s dog Mugg’s (The Dog that Bit People) died, he writes, “Mother wanted to bury him in the family lot under a marble stone with some such inscription as “Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” but we persuaded her it was against the law. In the end we just put up a smooth board above his grave along a lonely road. On the board I wrote with an indelible pencil “Cave Canem.” Mother was quite pleased with the simple classic dignity of the old Latin epitaph.“
To the most un-corporate person I know.
Should I have a tombstone someday, I would be quite pleased with the simple classic dignity of that sentiment.
reviewed interval with its tale of eventless monotonous days
Adapted from the passage:
He reviewed the short interval with its tale of eventless and monotonous days as he sat smoking a thoughtful pipe in the shady coco-nut grove that encompassed the hamlet, letting his thoughts travel back anon to a more distant and eventful past, and all the while keeping an attentive eye on a shabby-looking brigantine that was creeping up from the south. It was not, perhaps, a very thrilling spectacle, but yet Osmond watched the approaching vessel with lively interest. For though, on that deserted coast, ships may be seen to pass up and down on the rim of the horizon, two or three, perhaps, in a month, this was the first vessel that had headed for the land since the day on which he had become the owner of the factory and the sole representative of European civilization in Adaffia. It was natural, then, that he should watch her with interest and curiosity, not only as a visitor from the world which he had left, but as one with which he was personally concerned; for if her people had business ashore, that business was pretty certainly with him.
From A Certain Dr. Thorndyke by Richard Austin Freeman, Made and Printed in Great Britain for Hodder and Stoughton Limited, London, by Hasell, Watson & Viney, Ltd., London and Aylesbury, 1927
there was light good light but what I consider dawn … darker than all that
How Dark the Beginning
All we ever talk of is light— let there be light, there was light then, good light—but what I consider dawn is darker than all that.
So many hours between the day receding and what we recognize as morning, the sun cresting like a wave that won’t break over us—as if light were protective, as if no hearts were flayed, no bodies broken on a day like today. In any film, the sunrise tells us everything will be all right. Danger wouldn’t dare show up now, dragging its shadow across the screen.
We talk so much of light, please let me speak on behalf of the good dark. Let us talk more of how dark the beginning of a day is.
… by Maggie Smith.
According to Wikipedia, Maggie Smith is an American poet, freelance writer, and editor who lives in Bexley, Ohio.
Wikipedia also mentions that, In January 2022, when the board of trustees of McMinn County Schools in Tennessee, in a 10-0 decision, removed the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust graphic novel Maus from its curriculum for 8th grade English classes, overriding a State curriculum decision, Smith was critical of the decision. She tweeted: “We’ve lost our damn minds if we think that to keep kids safe in school, we need to ban books, not assault weapons”.
he wrote, never print anything that a scrub-woman cannot understand
‘no paper of mass appeal could afford to be without a staff astrologist or a palmist who could tell you how to improve your fortune’. ‘The space we devote to politics is a dead loss in circulation.’ He wrote ‘Never print anything that a scrub-woman in a skyscraper cannot understand’, a statement paralleled by R. D. Blumenfeld in England ‘never to forget the cabman’s wife’.
So said Emile Gauvreau in his book, My Last Million Readers (New York, 1941) as quoted by Harold Adams Innis in his book, The Press: A Neglected Factor in the Economic History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, London, 1949).
Mr. Innis writes: “In the intense competition for circulation and for advertising success was won by the use of reading matter and picture appeal in competition with the magazines and by the use of features which emphasized gossip about movie stars.“
No Haiku For You 