New Construction #1

I made this zine to inspire myself to finish other things.
48 pages
$2
Should be at MOCCA
next weekend, but I won't.
For sale soon at my
website and fine stores.

Exercise in Woodring

Here's the original. Looking at it closer, I think I missed some details. I couldn't resist it.

Shakespeare in the Wild West in the Park

During our last presidential election I made a vow (wrote it down in my vow/sketchbook) that if Bush won I would give up following political news and wean myself off sweet, sweet outrage and instead work at reading Shakespeare for the next 4 years. Like most election promises, this fell by the wayside. Would a bewilderment/outrage junkie miss out on these fat years?

But the other weekend I did go see "Much Ado About Nothing" with Ted and Sacha. I had a lovely time. It was free in Forest Park and the spin was What if...they talked like Shakespeare in the Wild West?! Claudio the cowboy. We sat toward the back, near the portable toilets. Their doors constantly opening and shutting behind us made a creaking, groaning sound. It was like being on a ship watching cowboys do Shakespeare. Also you could hear thumping dance music from an actual wedding somewhere else in the park.

100 years

Earlier this year I re-read Pragmatism by William James. It's not James at his best, but it's one of the main things for which he's remembered. I noted that Pragmatism was published in June of 1907, making this month 100 years. I thought about maybe blogging about that and filed it away.

Soon after I worked through most of Rorty and His Critics. Rorty was a follower of James and pragmatist. I had not read Rorty when I was in college "studying" philosophy. After Rorty and His Critics, I read some of Rorty's other books, not finishing any, but finding that he, like James, seemed mostly right on, as far as how I see and feel things to be.

Anyways late last night I saw that Richard Rorty has died, 100 years to the month after the publication of Pragmatism.

-dude, from the Creation Museum

CART

A Cultural History of the Modern Age

Oh, Hans, it's true--we can get through 3 volumes of the Friedell's Kulturgeschichte, appreciating its idiosyncracies, its fine anecdotal style, humanism, and tragic vision, while noting its spotty misunderstandings, its exaggerations, and we can feel moved to write on the Internet perhaps a helpful review, a thoughtfully qualified 4-starred recommendation, hoping that somehow a reader or two (of two) out there in the English-speaking world may feel moved to hunt down this long out-of-print, strange, magnificent, entertaining history, but nevertheless, in the end, the pluto-oligarchy will stick it to us.

I got mine out of the St. Louis Public Library.
No luck here.
Here's an electronic Volume I, anyways.
Here's Clive James on Friedell.


and here is how it all ends.

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Comic Book Stories

Hot new blog. Dave Kiersh celebrates some comics stories from the 70s and 80s.

Turtle

Today on the way home from breakfast I found a turtle in the road. To save him from being run over, I put him in my kitchen for a while. I woke Katie up to look at it. At first she thought it had got into the house on its own somehow. Then it crawled into the cat's food dish and sat there. We put it into a box and brought it to the park.

100 Most People In America

A Great Deal of Information about Wipers

can be found here.