"And we're going to have some fun with this, aren't we?"

Harris murmurs into the phone to Obama and Obama:

Earlier this week, Michelle and I called our friend @KamalaHarris. We told her we think she’ll make a fantastic President of the United States, and that she has our full support. At this critical moment for our country, we’re going to do everything we can to make sure she wins in… pic.twitter.com/0UIS0doIbA

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) July 26, 2024

I call her "Harris." I was going to call her "my girl Kamala" — because that's what Mrs. Obama calls her in that phone call — but the powers that be have warned us not to call her "Kamala" and of course you can't say "girl" — unless you can — and "my" is a terrible problem, perhaps insinuating a perverse sense of ownership. So I'll keep my distance. "Harris" is it. Don't harass me.

Now, about this concept of "fun." It might be the new word of the day, the word on the memo that everyone got. It came up in this new Ezra Klein podcast, "This Is How Democrats Win in Wisconsin":

I mean, Sunday, I was still hearing from Democrats worried about Harris... And now, I mean, watching the party not just converge around her, but feel a real thrill around her, like really, really become passionate Harris stans, like watching the whole party fall outta the coconut tree and live unburdened by what has been, and only in the imagining of what could be. It's fun to watch Democrats have fun. They have not had fun in a long time. And it's also a good reminder that people don't know how something is gonna feel until it actually happens....

People talking about fun... enthusing This is fun... that's not a good marker of fun... whatever fun is....

I think of Zippy the Pinhead: "Are we having fun yet?"

And "And she'll have fun fun fun/'Til her daddy takes the T-bird away...."

And "Fun is the one thing that money can’t buy."

"It would be nice if the wall-to-wall marathon showings of A Christmas Story on TBS and TNT led to a rediscovery of Jean Shepherd's other work..."

"... and even to a revival of the radio arts, but given that people have so many other things to occupy themselves nowadays, that it's unlikely." 

Said Lurker21, in the comments to the Christmas Café.

I've never seen "A Christmas Story," though I am one of Jean Shepherd's biggest fans. For years, in the 1960s, I used to get in bed in time to hear the "Call to Post" — which, today, sounds like something about blogging — on my radio tuned to WOR. And then...

 

Listening to those Jean Shepherd radio shows in the dark, night after night, was the pop culture highlight of lifetime. Of course, I heard him read "A Christmas Story" ever year. That was a tradition. But better than that was any random show on whatever he decided to talk about that night — another story of his childhood (back in Indiana) or some odd trail of musings.

From Wikipedia: 

Shepherd's oral narrative style was a precursor to that used by Spalding Gray and Garrison Keillor. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media wrote that Shepherd "regards radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly." In the Seinfeld season-six DVD set, commenting on the episode titled "The Gymnast", Jerry Seinfeld said, "He really formed my entire comedic sensibility—I learned how to do comedy from Jean Shepherd."... 

Shepherd was an influence on Bill Griffith's Zippy comic strip, as Griffith noted in his strip for January 9, 2000. Griffith explained, "The inspiration—just plucking random memories from my childhood, as I'm wont to do in my Sunday strip (also a way to expand beyond Zippy)—and Shep was a big part of them." 

In an interview with New York magazine, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen says that the eponymous figure from his solo album The Nightfly was based on Jean Shepherd. 

Though he primarily spent his radio career playing music, New York Top-40 DJ Dan Ingram has acknowledged Shepherd's style as an influence. An article he wrote for the March–April 1957 issue of MAD, "The Night People vs Creeping Meatballism", described the differences between what he considered to be "day people" (conformists) and "night people" (nonconformists).

A few days ago, in conversation on Facebook, I reconsidered my lifelong policy of averting my eyes from the film version of "A Christmas Story." Just to present my own comments: 

I've never seen "A Christmas Story" because I am too devoted to Jean Shepherd and the original story as told over the radio....

I know [you hear Shepherd's voice-over narration in the film], but I don't want to see the ideal replaced by a literal acting-out of the story by human actors. The adult's voice creates the kid feeling. I don't want to see a real boy acting out the emotions for the camera. It's radio, the ultimate in radio, and not film...

I think I need to change my position. "A Christmas Story" is a deviation from Shepherd's usual show, because he was reading a story — not riffing in real time — that had been published in a book and a magazine (Playboy). So it wasn't the pure radio ideal that I'm so staunch about. It is not one of his stories about his own youth, because he says before reading the story that the boy is *not* him. 

So did I finally watch the movie? No. Not yet, anyway. But I was motivated to listen to a random old show — something about midwestern drug stores. Nothing to do with Christmas, but I was listening on Christmas. 

I don't think of Shepherd as Christmas-y, and it annoys me a bit that so many people do. The radio show should be much more important that that one film version of a story he used to read on the radio. Should be, and perhaps is, as its influence is deeply woven into many things we actively enjoy today. It's baked into this blog.

Factoid: "Shepherd's friend Shel Silverstein likely wrote the Johnny Cash song 'A Boy Named Sue' because of him...."

Here's the podcast where I found my random old show yesterday. Here's a webpage with a lot of the old shows.

"To walk down the street with him is just a reminder that, no matter how boring you think the day is, there are always interesting things around you."

"If you think of just a walk to the corner as an opportunity to see something different, most of us don’t do that normally. He is just this super-voracious observer of everything."

Said Jen Bekman, an online art curator, quoted in "Jason Polan, an artist who set out to draw every person in New York, has died at 37" (WaPo)(Polan died of cancer).

Bekman said the idea for drawing every person in New York grew from the MoMa project [in which he drew every piece of art in the Museum of Modern Art]. The drawings were done in haste on small pads of paper with a Uni-Ball Vision Elite pen, capturing New Yorkers in only a few minutes or seconds as they completed some quotidian activity: commuting, reading, sitting. He gave himself one rule: “I only draw the person while I can see them,” as he explained in his book introduction.

The result meant that some people didn’t have hands or legs. Some had blank faces floating on white paper — like “Edward Norton at Lafayette” — as they whizzed past Polan mid-drawing or disappeared through the subway doors.

I bought the book "Every Person in New York." I love stuff like this, and have engaged in this kind of drawing project myself. My favorite example of this genre, and my favorite art book of all time is "Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry."

ADDED: I love that we're told the pen — Uni-Ball Vision Elite pen. You can get 12 of those things for $26. We're not told the brand of sketchbook. Maybe something like this. You could carry a 6"x4" pad in your pocket and a Uni-Ball pen and always be looking for things to draw. Think about why you would do that instead of just taking photos of anything that interests you. It makes a big difference! It makes you something more like a "super-voracious observer of everything."

ALSO: Polan put his drawings on a Blogspot blog, here, from 2008 until the end of last year. From his description in the sidebar: "I am trying to draw every person in New York. I will be drawing people everyday and posting as frequently as I can.... If I do draw you, you will see yourself (or rather, a drawing that hopefully somewhat resembles you) on this blog that evening. When the project is completed we will all have a get together." That last sentence takes on new meaning.

At the Snowfall Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

And think of buying what you want on Amazon by going in through the Althouse Portal. I'll recommend a book: "Invisible Ink: My Mother's Love Affair With A Famous Cartoonist" by Bill Griffith.

What if the things you're doing for fun are, you realize, in fact, work?

The saddest thing about this question is that when I googled it, the top hits were advice to people who were stymied by the question, What do you do for fun? Doing things for fun isn't an end in itself, but an intimidating line of inquiry en route to something else you want.

So, from the eHarmony blog:

Have you ever given your dates a blank stare when they asked, “What do you do for fun?” Yes, it sounds like the simplest of questions, but it can be the one of the most stressful to answer.

Maybe you think back to what you did last Sunday, and you come up with this list: Snacking. Napping. Surfing Facebook. “You can’t tell your date that!” you scold yourself. “You’re supposed to be doing something interesting!”...

It's not that they want to do something interesting (other than have a successful date), but that they're afraid another person will view them as uninteresting.

This helps me a little with the question I'm trying to answer. I'm thinking: Perhaps when things you think you're doing for fun are, honestly, work, you've been looking at yourself from the imagined viewpoint of others and hoping to seem interesting/attractive/fun-loving to them, and you've lost track of how you really feel.

And here's some advice for people doing job interviews and anxious about the question — worded exactly the same way as it was on the dating blog: What do you do for fun? The advice, as you might imagine, is to have something specific to say that makes you seem like an active and constructive person. And leave out the illegal stuff! I'll quote this because I laughed out loud:

The point is that you enjoy things outside of work and that you have some way of communicating that enjoyment to other people, even if they don’t share that interest themselves. Or even if that interest is something societally disruptive and objectively unfun. Like cycling....

Back to my question in the post title. I invite you to talk about the realization that the things you've been doing for fun are, to be honest, work. Have you had this realization? When? What did you do with it? Did you abandon the activity or change how you did it or how you thought about it? You can also resist the question with ideas like: 1. "Fun" shouldn't be an important organizing principle, 2. The idea of "fun" is a substitute for something more meaningful that should be discovered and forefronted, and 3. Thinking in terms of "fun" ruins fun.*

___________________

* And that's why we laugh at the comic strip with the line "Are we having fun yet?"). From the Wikipedia article on Zippy the Pinhead:

In regard to Zippy's famous catch phrase, at the 2003 University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, Griffith recalled the phone call from Bartlett's:

When Bartlett's approached me in—I forget what year, five or six years ago—I got a call from the editor. And he was going to give me credit for the "Are we having fun yet" saying, but he wanted to know exactly where Zippy had first said it. I did some research (I had no idea), and I eventually found... the strip "Back to Pinhead, the Punks and the Monks" from Yow #2 in 1979... That's the first time he said, "Are we having fun yet?" Certainly not intended by me to be anything more than another non sequitur coming out of Zippy's mind.

Zippy's signature expression of surprise is "Yow!"

I have Yow #2 somewhere in this house. I know because I show myself buying it on Page 13 of my Amsterdam Notebooks. (The Dutch salesman at the comic books store pronounces "Yow" as we say "Yo," and I'm delusional enough to think he'd like to hear a 42-year-old American lady riff on the "yow"/"yo" distinction in English.)

But I don't need to look for my copy of the book to find that ancient strip. Here.

"Nancy doesn’t tell us much about what it’s like to be a kid. What Nancy tells us is what it’s like to be a comic strip."

Wrote Bill "Zippy the Pinhead" Griffith, quoted in "Grown Men Reading 'Nancy'" by Dash Shaw in the New York Review of Books. I followed the "Nancy" craze at the time, so it's fun for me to stumble into reading about it today:

Nancy became a touchstone for artists to appropriate, distort, and transform. In Raw, Mark Newgarden’s 1986 comic Love’s Savage Fury depicted a Nancy whose minimal facial features rearrange while Bazooka Joe, a Topps bubblegum package mascot, eyes her across a NYC subway. Newgarden (who worked at Topps and co-created The Garbage Pail Kids) and Paul Karasik (a Raw associate editor and cartoonist who would go on to co-write the graphic-novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass) then collaborated on a 1988 essay titled “How to Read Nancy” that deconstructed the elements of a single 1959 Nancy gag in nine ways across eight pages. By isolating elements of the comic, they explored how each piece supported the entire gag—for example, solely the dialogue of the strip; then solely the spotted blacks; then the arc of the horizon line, etc....

Three decades later, in an epic feat of comics fandom, research, and obsession, Newgarden and Karasik have expanded that essay into a 274-page book examining over forty elements of the same 1959 gag.

Whoa! Must buy.

This gag comic strip now joins the ranks of works of art that have entire books dedicated to them. What Newgarden and Karasik have done here is clearly, methodically, often hilariously explained the unique beauty and craft of comics..... [O]ne chapter of How to Read Nancy, titled “The Leaky Spigot,” focuses on the number of droplets placed around the spigot at the center of the strip. Four droplets communicate that there is a great deal of pressure pulsing through the hose. The greater the pressure, the more rewarding Nancy’s vengeance will be. Two or three droplets would not imply this strength of pressure. Five might suggest a malfunction, and would break the graphic symmetry of the design. Karasik and Newgarden also note that the droplets to the right are slightly smaller and therefore in spatial perspective. Every element of the strip is analyzed to this degree of fascinating and humorous detail.

It must have been hard for Dash Shaw to resist quoting the most famous thing anyone ever said about "Nancy": "It's harder to not read Nancy than to read it." I'm saying it because it's harder not to say it than to say it.

"The one great beauty of comics, among the many others, is that you don’t have to worry about anybody funding it."

"In the worst-case scenario, you can just publish it yourself. You can Xerox it and hand it out to your friends. It will still get published if you want it to. In the past four or five years, I’ve just really embraced coming back to comics. It’s been the most fun it’s ever been."

Says Dan Clowes, who's had the experience of having his comics "Ghost World" and "Art School Confidential."

When you’re working on films, your work’s contingent on all these other factors that are beyond your control. For me, it was a good thing to do for a third or half of my time for seven or eight years, but at a certain point I got really tired of the arbitrary things that happen. You have projects all set up and then something loses its tax deferment or something like that—it’s so frustrating! 

I really identify with that because: 1. I used to maintain a daily sketchbook habit (mostly things in the manner of "Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry," but I was a follower of many comics artists, including Clowes), and 2. It's the ethic of independent blogging, my daily habit of the last 11 years. Or wait... In the worst-case scenario, you can just publish it yourself.... That's not the worst case! That's the best case. No delay. No editors. No naysayers. No obstructionists. Freedom.

Maybe girls will buy it if it's pink...

That's Penguin's new cover for the Roald Dahl classic "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," as seen at "The five worst book covers ever." The other 4 are so much less bad that it's scarcely worth pretending this is a real listicle (even if writing a listicle were something worth aspiring to).

The worst book covers I ever saw were on display at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, where I traveled in 1993. This was in the days before digital photography when I traveled without a camera in what I consider my "Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry" period. On page 33 of what I call my "Amsterdam Notebooks" — at the bottom of the second image — I wrote and sketched about the various copies of the diary, translated into many different languages, with the Spanish version — "Cuentos" — featuring a smiling blonde girl and the French version reproducing an 1877 Renoir portrait of a rosy-skinned blonde woman in the most absurdly comfortable, cossetted circumstances imaginable:

100 years ago today, a suffragette attacked this Velázquez painting with a meat cleaver.

"I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history," said Mary Richardson, after hacking 7 deep cuts into  the "Rokeby Venus" — AKA "The Toilet of Venus," "Venus at her Mirror," "Venus and Cupid," or "La Venus del espejo."



The suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst had been arrested the previous day. Richardson got a 6-month sentence (the most that could be given for vandalizing artwork. In a much later interview — in 1952 — she said she didn't like "the way men visitors gaped at [the painting] all day long."

Contemporary reports of the incident reveal that the picture was not widely seen as mere artwork. Journalists tended to assess the attack in terms of a murder (Richardson was nicknamed "Slasher Mary"), and used words that conjured wounds inflicted on an actual female body, rather than on a pictorial representation of a female body. The Times, in an article that contained factual inaccuracies as to the painting's provenance, described a "cruel wound in the neck", as well as incisions to the shoulders and back.

Here's how it looked:

Roger Ebert has died.

"On Tuesday, Mr. Ebert blogged that he had suffered a recurrence of cancer following a hip fracture suffered in December, and would be taking 'a leave of presence.' In the blog essay, marking his 46th anniversary of becoming the Sun-Times film critic, Ebert wrote 'I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers hand-picked and greatly admired by me.'"

Working on something he loved right up to the last minute, despite all adversity....

I'm sorry to see him go. I met him once at a bookstore event. I was with my son Chris — a big movie-lover — who was young and excited about meeting Ebert, so I waited in line. For some reason, the book we had in hand for signing was "Two Weeks In Midday Sun : A Cannes Notebook," which has not just writing by Ebert, but drawings — line drawings. As Chris was interacting with him, I said that I loved the drawings.

I was, at the time, immensely interested in travel sketchbooks, most notably Bill Griffith's "Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry." I, myself, traveled with a sketchbook and a fountain pen (and no camera) and made my trips all about drawings. So I was sincere in my enthusiasm for his drawing, and he immediately said that the drawings were very bad.

Oh, no, I love them, I said. They're very charming! Afterwards, I realized that it was absurd for me to encourage his drawings and baby him about their charm. Look at how he joyfully brutalized the bad films, even collecting the meanest reviews in books with titles like "I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie." He was a critic, and I was being uncritical.

I must have sounded like a kindergarten teacher to him. I didn't have the time to talk about the Griffith tradition and my own adventures in Amsterdam. It was just a book signing encounter. Move along. No connection made.

There are many, many Roger Ebert books of course.

"The Free Library of Philadelphia is hosting speed-dating sessions where each potential suitor has to bring a representative book as an icebreaker..."

"... and we couldn't help but wonder: if you were (or are) on the market, which book would you bring to introduce yourself?  And which book, in the hands of the person across the table, would have you wincing and hoping for the next rotation to happen quickly?"

I'd bring "Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry."

As for the books that would be off-putting in the other person's hands... there are so many things. The first thing that pops into my head is: astrology. But you don't need to go to a special library-sponsored book-in-hand dating event for would-be suitors to disqualify themselves with astrology.

Searching "Zippy."

You can now do a word search through all the old "Zippy the Pinhead" comic strips! How incredibly cool. What's the first word you search?

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 13.

It's Day 13 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.)

You can see by the ticket stub collaged into the first side of the page that it's August 10, 1993. I go to see the movie "The Piano" and am confused by some things and pleased by others. On the second side of the page, I draw two signs for bookstores: Tweedehands Boekwinkels and Oom Wim. I'm delighted by these words, though I realize they must be perfectly ordinary in Dutch – surely "Tweedehands Boekwinkels" is just "secondhand booksellers" – but irresistibly cute and silly to American ears.

I go into a third store, a big comics shop called Lambiek. I'm utterly under the spell of "Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry," as these notebook pages attest, so I ask if he has any Bill Griffith books. He has "Yow!" and I buy it. I also buy "Verre d'Eau" (that is, "Weirdo," R. Crumb's comic), "Understanding Comics" (which had just come out), and two books by Mark Beyer, whom I adore. The two Mark Beyer books are "Amy and Jordan" and "Agony." I'd been searching for "Agony," which I'd read before, but not owned, and was happy enough to find a German-language copy of it. "Amy and Jordan" makes a huge impression on me for the rest of the trip and distinctively influences the drawing that you'll see on Page 22.

"Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry." Speaking of sketchbook travels, this book, by Bill Griffith, had a big influence on me. Unfortunately, it's out of print and Amazon isn't even showing a picture of the cover of the book. Worse, there are only three reviews, all high praise, but two of them didn't figure out how to give a star rating and are counted as zeroes, leaving the book with one and a half stars. Too bad! Oh, forget Amazon--and curse the tendency to always start there--go here. Bill Griffith sells it from his own site--which has lots of great stuff--with the inscription of your choice. Get this book!