May 2008 Archives

The Dallas-Fort Worth arts news/reviews/blog/calendar website that book/daddy has been working on has launched. It's called Art & Seek. It's produced by KERA, the NPR/PBS station for North Texas.

book/daddy is writing in simple, declarative sentences this morning. That is all his mind can produce. book/daddy thinks the culture news/reviews/feature section (in light orange) should be bigger, so it doesn't look like just an enlarged listing or tout. That's about the best he can manage. What do you think?

This is the last week of classes in Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet High School for my daughter, the Comic Book Queen, pictured, left, in her self-portrait, entitled, Otto Dix, I Want to Paint Like You. Next week, the family arrives like invading Cossacks. The week after, she graduates.

Soooooo ... book/daddy is kinda busy right now, you know?

• Rattatouille as a metaphor for Disney vs. Pixar. Naturally, this comes from a website called The Journal of Cartoon Over-Analyzations, but it works surprisingly well. 
• Charles Fort was not barking mad; well, not quite, despite his belief that showers of blood are the solar system's internal hemorrhages. Author-magic-historian Jim Steinmeyer has found another historical character who mixes magic and science in weird ways.  
• "A French doctor, Séverin Icard, was so anxious to confirm the death of one patient in 1905 that he inserted a needle into her heart; she had been alive but his test quickly remedied that" -- from Melanie King's history of death, The Dying Game, as reviewed in the Telegraph.
• Talking to myself: The "lost" Alexander Dumas novel, The Last Cavalier, has been published in translation. "The key thing to know about Dumas is that he was brilliant at cliff-hangers but hopeless at dialogue. And this novel has an awful lot of dialogue. And dialogue within dialogue. And even dialogue within dialogue within dialogue."

My Beautiful Mommy, the children's book that fills a need -- the need for women with breast implants to explain to their kids how and why they were suddenly transformed.

I foresee a second volume in which the little girl, inspired by her heroic mother, spends three days locked in the bathroom weepingly obsessing over her own nose -- then, in a uplifting twist, saves up her bake sale money to buy rhinoplasty. "And while you've got me on the table, Dr. Michael, how about fitting me for a nice pair of breasts -- I can't wait for puberty to do all the work." (For the movie I see Dakota Fanning in the lead and Danny DeVito as the left implant. Just throwing that out there.) ...

Then again, I probably shouldn't be too critical. This book does give a real boost to my efforts to publish my manuscript My Drunk Bitter Daddy, which -- in a frank and entertaining way -- answers a young son's questions about why his Daddy comes home drunk and bitter. "You see, as I got older, my wife got huge fake boobs and left me for a pool boy named Raoul..."

• Beefing about Angus: Faber & Faber has started to reprint out-of-print books via print-on-demand (the imprint will be called Faber Finds). Got all that? So the Guardian asked a passel of authors which books they'd like to see resurrected. Plenty of tantalizingly unfamiliar titles, some forgotten, some never known. But the "lost" author who keeps popping up: Angus Wilson.

        Matt Diffee for The New Yorker  

• Former Denton, Texas native (and current New Yorker cartoonist) Matt Diffee is interviewed about the two volumes of The Rejection Collection he edited of cartoons the New Yorker turned down -- generally on grounds of bad taste:

Can you foresee another era in which cartoonists are glittering celebrities and dating movie stars again, as in Charles Addams' era? Who among the current cartoonists would be most likely to meet that description should that happen again, do you think?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ah ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...uh, no.