ridiculous

We all know moving house is stressful but it's now 3am and I have been entirely unable to sleep. The alarm is set for 5, when I plan to drive to Parkville with a carload of books and paintings etc to clear out the house enough for the removalists to come at 11 to get the big things, as they're known. I mean I will be able to come back, I guess, and sleep for a couple of hours but it would have been better if I'd been allowed by my 'overactive' (read: churning) brain to just sleep when necessary.

The dumb thing is I really can't stand sleeping and I don't have much sympathy for people who love it. So I am extra annoyed by the necessity of it. Jetlag's coming, too. 

NB still haven't got my replacement phone, though very glad btw that I got insurance

great time to be leaving albion

reborn

Hilariously, I am now liberated from my phone and it is as though I have been in a daze all this time. It's been about 30 hours since I last saw it and when I was out tonight at Open Studio (Alanna and band played their/our first show) I felt myself able to do all kinds of crazy new things like, for instance, look straight ahead for periods of time or have minor conversations and not feel I had to look occupied all the time. It's mental. Of course I was also very judgey when it came to all the people I saw around me, looking at their phones.

tangled hitchcockian web

Sometime yesterday evening between about 7pm and 10pm, I misplaced or lost (what's the difference) my phone, or, it was stolen, who knows. I only know I messaged Alanna at 6:55 to say I was about to arrive to take her to rehearsal, and then at rehearsal I was like 'where's my phone? it must be in my coat pocket' when I finally checked it wasn't and I was like 'it must be in the car' and if it is, I can't find it. Really odd, and I just don't know if it's been stolen (?!) or fell out of the car (is that even possible?), either way, Find My iPhone says it's offline now, which I suppose means all kinds of things. Surely it's in the car.

But this is where the fragility of my/one's daily life and identity comes into play. Because I want to be able to blog, I check my gmail on my phone, and leave the old email up on my laptop (this is confusing to read/explain, don't worry about it) and so when I wanted to check my gmail on my laptop I couldn't remember the password, because I keep passwords like that on my phone, and now my request to be allowed to view my gmail is under review by, I don't know, google. I am falling through the abyss like the beginning of Mad Men crossed with some scene I'm probably misremembering from The Matrix. 

It'll all sort out and I'll be back in the flimsy fabric of whatever we currently think of as reality, schmucks that we are.

painting i did

I finally finished this painting yesterday. All I did to finish it (it had been sitting around for six months incomplete) was the black outline, and it really worked well in my opinion. I mean insofar as it looks a bit like a children's book illustration from the early 1970s, which I guess is my wellspring.

unpickupable, that's what you are

I've got a cold and I feel poorly - particularly tough cough and tough because it just seems unfair after getting through the flu or something only a few weeks ago! Screw this.
So, today I'm on leave anyway, and I hung around the house mainly and spent quite a bit of time with these guys (that's Pompey on the left and Chanticleer on the right). I continue to marvel about how cuddly they have become from the angst-ridden wormy desperadoes of a few months ago. Pompey in particular is still pretty flighty and neither of them really like being picked up (but then, neither does Nancy. Maybe no cats really like it). But they are very happy cats now.
The unhappy one is Nancy who is cranky at them but maybe she'll come round.
Maybe.
I have wasted today basically, except I did take Barry and Ferdie for a walk but Ferdie blotted his copybook, LITERALLY by running away from me and disappearing completely. I found him in the street about five minutes later apparently eating a piece of bread.

I Shot the Sherriff

I have inherited a lot of cassettes from the redoubtable (whatever that literally means, it's one of those words like 'erstwhile') Michelle Cannane including one of ska/reggae classics which I have basically been playing non-stop in the car for weeks now. When I say non-stop I mean, when I am driving, when I am in the car, and when I am listening to a tape, not a podcast off my phone. Anyway, it's a great collection which resonates for me and makes me wonder things. I had the single of Eric Clapton's 'I Shot the Sheriff' in the mid-70s, I guess I knew (from reading the label) that it was written by Bob Marley but like a lot of things that were floating round the ether otherwise I both thought about it and didn't think about it. I think I found the caveat that the singer didn't shoot the deputy was the funny/intriguing part. The deputy is probably the more interesting figure in the whole story but we don't hear much about him (OR HER). The song on the tape by the way is, I have to assume, Bob Marley's version. (I could hold a lot of different thoughts about Eric Clapton at once when I was a kid. I think I knew he had made that racist speech around the time it happened, but it's hard to be certain about that now of course. I would never have been into the racism but the sheer hypocrisy of a man who had based his career on appropriation of black music lecturing a crowd on the benefits of keeping Britain white might have gone over my head a bit. Not sure. I soon came to despise Eric Clapton though but I still totally love Jack Bruce. Because I am a namby pamby my favourite Jack Bruce album is Harmony Row i.e. the completely most commercial one, though Songs for a Tailor has a special place in my heart, the copy I own I purchased second hand from Readings in Hawthorn (when it was on the eastern side of Glenferrie Road, know what I mean) and played the fucking thing to death, except not, because it still lives. I mean Jack had all the prowess of Eric but he could also, like, write amazing songs and was very adventurous in the way that Eric wasn't (band-hopping doesn't count as adventurous). Eric's name is also 'Eric' which means you can't take him seriously. 

The other songs on the reggae-ska tape are way cool too. It must date from the early 80s as a compilation, because it's full of tracks later made famous in the late 70s-early 80s ska revival like the song the Specials retitled 'A Message to You Rudy' and what I'm guessing is 'Moon Hop'. 

'SO YEAH'

I didn't...

keep reading the John Taylor book, although I kind of skimmed it to the end. I wanted to see whether he talked about the last ten or twenty years with as much detail as the first thirty (of his life) and yeah nah. I don't have any Duran Duran records. I find 'Planet Earth' a massively annoying song. I like 'Careless Memories'. I can't stand 'Girls on Film', but I do like 'A View to a Kill' and 'The Reflex', also 'Hungry Like a Wolf' in fact when I think about it it's really only the two above mentioned I really don't care for. I think I should invest in some albums, maybe Rio. I have a weird feeling I might have owned Rio for a while. I want the Power Station album too. I like the singles and maybe I would love some of the other tracks.

Meanwhile here is what I've been playing to the cats lately...

The second Utopia album called Utopia
The Red Crayola's Three Songs on a  Trip to the USA - always a huge hit around here
Al Stewart's Year of the Cat album - played that about four times this weekend
Both the Lilliput albums

TBH I think that's about it. I do have a sweet ass stereo system now so I really should play more stuff at home, but when there's no-one to annoy but cats, it feels a little empty.

how to read nancy

I found this book pretty unputdownable and the fore and aft matter (description of Ernie Bushmiller's life and precursors to Nancy at the front; various intriguing appendices and related material at the back) pretty fascinating. It's a beautiful production as well in terms of its clean design.

The text is forensic and at the centre is an in-depth analysis of just one Nancy strip from the late 1950s with all the component parts reviewed: how do we 'read' a strip like this, what are the tropes it depends on, how is our eye guided, what does the text mean (in the example used, the text is the same phrase three times over) and so on. It's more about Bushmiller's skill as a comic strip artist than it is about Nancy or anything intrinsic to her, except that Nancy is a crucial element in the best of Bushmiller's work.

After reading this I started on John Taylor's autobiography. Really intriguing stuff about early Birmingham days and a chapter on being a Birmingham 'flaneur' in the mid-70s which I might even use in teaching next year. I don't know if I'll persist into the decadence decades though (I'm at Seven and the Ragged Tiger now).

Nancy 2019

Nancy the perfect cat is named for Nancy Sinatra, of course, and her boots (not seen here). That's a no-brainer. Initially I named her Riley (that's what she's called on her desexing certificate, I hope that doesn't ever  cause a problem). I had this idea of her living the life of riley, you see, so she would be out in the world having adventures and sometimes coming back to check in but never really being a domesticated cat. At the time she was so wild you couldn't even touch her. So it was a bit arrogant calling her Riley in a way because it was like 'you live your life and just feel grateful that you can', but on the other hand, the council would have had her put down as an unredeemable feral. But as all three cats in the room with me right now show, no-one is ever an unredeemable feral. A few minutes ago (Nancy will be disgusted to read) I had Pompey and Chanticleer both crawling over me purring. These were cats who a few months ago would not let a person touch them (I don't think anyone ever had) and would constantly hiss at anyone other than each other.

Anyway I actually came here to talk about Nancy the comic strip, which as you may know has experienced an extraordinary revival in the last year and a bit (?) under the direction of a woman whose name we don't know (but we do accept it's a woman, for some reason) pseudonymously called 'Olivia Jaimes'.

Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy (I made quite a few contributions to this wikipedia entry, not about Nancy but about Bushmiller, which I was fairly pleased with, that's what I'm like) was, as Jaimes has sussed, a greedy and self-centred, if benign, little child whose femaleness was reasonably irrelevant (in the sense that she wasn't girly). Did I get that right? I mean, she was greedy and self-centred, but that it was only in that low-key way that most children are. She was a creative problem solver, for herself and others, but only insofar as the solving meant some kind of quirky labour-saving or unexpected reuse, etc.* It was actually when it comes down to it all about the gag, although to his credit Bushmiller seems to have kept the simple character traits of Nancy in place for decades. The wikipedia entry satisfactorily conveys his approach I think.

What intrigued me was what happened after Bushmiller died, particularly in the Guy (and Brad) Gilchrist years prior to Jaimes coming on board, where the Nancy strips just got cheesier and cheesier and Aunt Mitzi just got bustier and bustier, and it all ends up being like some kind of alien misreading of Americana (or an all-too-true reading, I don't know anymore). Going to the Nancy site and hitting 'random' will quickly get you to some of these. I did it just then and got to this from 1998:

I won't even bother showing you the 'gag' in this strip because there basically isn't one.

Anyway I'm not here to demonise Guy Gilchrist I'm just more interested in, a la Mickey Mouse or Elton John, how a property/product loses its defining or interesting features over time, and becomes a kind of cipher that people just want to have around, without really caring what else they might get out of it. The cultural version of comfort food I suppose.

So hats off to whoever decided to bring 'Olivia Jaimes' on board for the post-Gilchrist Nancy because it has gone from being a dull anachronism to the funniest daily comic strip in the mainstream now, by far. Not only is it in itself brilliant, the characters - all the new supporting characters Jaimes has brought in, teachers and friends and enemies etc - are (I don't think I'm reading too much into this, maybe I am) a billion times more rounded than most comic strip casts, and that even (no definitely) goes for Aunt Fritzi, who is actually now, like, a person.

I also love Jaimes' ability to cap a decent enough joke (in this case, that Sluggo's musical notes turn into Zs - that's Bushmilleresque) with an actually really funny last frame, that shows once again how self-centred Nancy is, but for some reason it's ok because she's just clueless about it. She's closer to one of Sarah Silverman's typifications of herself (obviously not SS herself) in that regard than she is to the original Bushmiller Nancy, let alone the kewpie troll of the Gilchrist era.** I'm lovin' it.

*Exception is I suppose that Sluggo is her boyfriend and she has a lot of fears and tribulations when it comes to maintaining that relationship. I can't really go there. I don't think they're sleeping together.

** I am probably being too hard on the Gilchrists, some of their stuff was OK, but it just comes across as OK despite themselves, not because they were trying to be great. Does that make sense? Maybe not. The poignancy of this frame explains what I mean:

thought bubble

I have a lot of things to say about misappropriation, just generally, but also about misdesignation, which is not a word, of important everyday symbols or devices which are intended to communicate something but end up communicating something else entirely when misused.

So can I just say 'thought bubble', which is usually used to suggest 'a small ill-formed or unformed or pre-formed idea which may or may not develop into something more robust' is a misappropriation of the reality of the thought bubble in comics which is basically a thought cloud - it sits above the character's head and only they know what's in it but essentially it's silent and personal. A thought bubble is what you're thinking, like Nancy's thought above. It's a done deal. You can't pop it, it won't burst under pressure. I don't like this misuse of 'thought bubble'.

Don't even start me on 'brain fart'. Please, ugh.

a bit from my forthcoming CJ Degaris book which I am about to delete

I don't know if it's good or bad or it just is. This is how I write though, now - I work it out on the page.

The health-giving properties of sunlight were renowned and in a period when the 1918 influenza pandemic was wracking the world, the notion of sunlight as ‘nature’s disinfectant’ had taken hold. It was a stretch to imagine that drying fruit in the sun was somehow not only a hygienic process but also a process by which the health-giving properties of sunlight entered the food, but the association was in many ways enough. Under analysis ‘Sunraysia’ comes apart pretty quickly; it might even be some kind of knock at ‘Asia’ (but then, twenty years later no-one thought that about Fantasia).

I know this isn't particularly great writing. In many ways I'm getting worse... I am losing track of how to spell homonyms, for instance. I don't blame spellcheck so much as email, where you write stuff to people but it's really like you're thinking or saying it, so you're (well, I'm) 'hearing it in your [my] head'. 

I am sure the 'aysia' in 'Sunraysia' has fuck all to do with asia though. Once you express a thought bubble like that, you can dismiss it.* 

By the way: thought bubbles. Hmm.

* Update: Unless the past doesn't let you. A few months after writing the above I found a critique of the word 'Sunraysia' by DeGaris' enemies suggesting that it was unAustralian for sounding too much like the demonised 'Asia'! People are so creative. 

My Friend Mr Leakey

(Yesterday) I just finished reading My Friend Mr Leakey or at least the first three stories in the book which are about Mr. Leakey. I'll save the other stories for another time. I can't read a bunch of short stories in a row because I get confused, it feels like that segment in Spicks and Specks where they make you sing instructions from a gardening book to the tune of 'Friday on my Mind'.

The reason I wanted to reread was that when I gained these cats and decided I wanted to keep one of them, from somewhere in the depths of my mind I thought he should probably be called Pompey, after Mr. Leakey's slightly naughty dragon. Actually, Pompey the cat is not particularly naughty (his brother Chanticleer is very naughty) but quite reclusive and shy, though since he got out of the house a week ago and had a lost weekend (in rain and cold) from Friday-Monday he has also become quite affectionate, or whatever I interpret as affectionate. Wants to be patted. Which I suppose is less affectionate and more affection-receptive. Anyway, Pompey the dragon lives in the fireplace and has to always been intensely hot, I think the most text devoted to him is when he goes awol in a volcano. He is sort of like a naughty, dangerous dog.

As a child I somehow knew that J. B. S. Haldane was not an ordinary children's book author, but I didn't know anything about him really, and the wikipedia entry above actually makes me interested enough to want to possibly think about reading a biography. I enjoy this kind of figure. But before I do that I have to fix the stupid structure of the actual wikipedia entry which is foolishly ad hoc.

For one second

I'm a great example of how easy it is to inhibit a technology user with the simplest of impediments. I think I mentioned previously how totes much of a drag it is getting in to update this blog because it's associated with an old email address I recklessly abandoned a few years ago. I never wanted to be the kind of person (i.e. practically everyone on earth) who abandoned their blog, and I am pretty sure I'd be much more of an updater if I didn't have to go through this two-minute rigmarole of getting from one preset gmail scenario to another. The previous post, by the way, was scheduled five or more years ago and would have shown up whatever happened.

So look it's super easy and also stupid to say 'I vow to henceforth update frequently' because that's meaningless but I miss blogging, indeed, the main thing I hate about blogging is, I still hate the word blog/blogging but that's OK really. I am somewhat freed by the fact that no-one on earth reads this shit now (there might be one or two people who have alerts scheduled who will be surprised to find I have posted this, and also, have to remember 'who' I 'am'). If I don't post again in the near future let me just update you to a situation of no real change: still living in Albion, not liking it that much, got a lot of work on, got at least one (co-edited) book coming out this year, another one (sole-authored) on track for next year, going overseas next month for five weeks, that in particular is cause enough to blog right. I'm not that excited about the o/s trip at this point but at least I don't have that stupid feeling I used to have of 'I have so much to do in Melbourne, I can't leave, what a drag' though that feeling still has a month or so to appear. We'll see.