[4-color ma] Just a bit batty

I know that I haven't blogged about comics for a while, but I swear that this Batman post was not designed just to take advantage of the upcoming Halloween holiday. I just happened to run across a couple of Bat-items to share.




I was reading an online WIRED article about old-timey Halloween costumes when I came across this photo:

Click to embiggen and take a look at that fellow on the far left. I don't know what the rest of those folks are supposed to be, but doesn't he look just a bit like a road-show version of a certain caped crusader? Now take a look at the date of that photo: 1924. It's a truism by this point that Bob Kane and Bill Finger had lots of historical and contemporary models for their new comic book character in 1939, but a photo like this makes me wonder just how much a bat-man character was in the public consciousness already. The first real-life version of Batman, in the 1943 movie serial, has a cowl that looks remarkably similar to this one, particularly in the ears:

Or maybe not - maybe that pre-depression dude is just a devil or something, and the ear thing is a coincidence. But this recent costume ad shows that the tradition of goofy bat-ears continues to this day:


In other bat-news, I finally got a chance to watch Batman: Gotham Knight, the recent direct-to-video sort-of anime version of a Batman movie. The draw for this film was supposed to be seeing the Batman story interpreted by six different directors in six separate but vaguely connected short episodes. It was entertaining and fun, but the central conceit just didn't work for me: I found that the six episodes weren't really different enough for the experiment to work. There was no sharp contrast between the interpretations; one Batman might have been a little heavier and another a little techier, but the art styles and character designs were all pretty similar, and Gotham City looked pretty much the same, in all the episodes. This feeling may have been exacerbated by the first episode's being an animated remake of the 1973 comic book story "The Batman Nobody Knows," in which Batman, seen by three youngsters, is perceived as a completely different character by each. Those imagined Batman images really were different from one nother; the "real" Batman in each of the six episodes, not so much.

The enterprise was saved by the overall quality of the films, in particular "Working Through the Pain," in which a wounded Batman, struggling to reach Alfred and the Batmobile, has flashback memories to his time spent in India, where he learned pain control from a mystic. Its closing scene stands among the most poignant uses of the Batman story in any media.

[blockhead] Writing about writing is not a sin

This post has some origins in the lack of recent posts on this blog, but we're not going down that ol' solipsistic road again. No, the absence of posts is merely a symptom of something larger that has come to my attention recently, and that is a lack of writing of any sort.


That this blog is involved at all is only the result of the recent change of format. The Original HKC was anecdotal most of the time, and frequently held collage posts comprised of random, unrelated thoughts. That stuff hardly counts as writing at all. With Walakanet, I have been trying to move away from posts for post's sake and more toward the essai, works that, while still fairly short, are still composed and not merely jotted. We're not aiming at Montaigne here, but the bar has been raised high enough that posts to this blog nowadays could be considered to be legitimate writing.

And it is personal writing of this nature that is the issue here. To be sure, there is no lack of writing in my life, in a technical sense. I am an English teacher; I write syllabi and lesson plans and assignment rubrics and emails all the live-long day, and I will argue strenuously with anyone who does not consider those products "real" writing. At the same time, there is a dearth of that writing that is not task- or audience-driven - or to put an even finer point on it, that writing that is not obligatory but voluntary. There are no short stories, no creative non-fiction, no poems flying out of my word processor. And I don't think that I am alone among my peers in feeling this lacuna.

A colleague from Cascadia volunteers at 826 Seattle, the nonprofit writing center in Greenwood, and attends a regular Thursday gathering of English teachers there. He reported that at a recent get-together, when asked if they considered themselves writers or teachers, six of the eight in attendance thought of themselves only as teachers and not as writers.

Work pal NatDog put a personal face on this issue during one of our recent drives into work together. She was telling me about a friend of hers who'd had an article published in a magazine and asked why she, who was an English teacher and theoretically knew more about writing than her friend, was not writing articles and getting them published. It wasn't a rhetorical question, but I had no useful response for her, and the remaining twenty minutes on northbound Lake City way provided no answers either.

I do have some clues, though. The easy answer is, of course, time. For example, I have always wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo, the write-a-novel-in-a-month project that rolls around every November. Well, I considered it again this year, and then realized that over the first weekend of the month, when I would need to complete 14 pages to be starting out on pace, I will have (conservatively) twelve hours of responding papers to get through as well. I just can't see how I could do both projects. Teaching composition has its benefits in the classroom, but seems to require the most out-of-class time.

But although time is the easy answer, I am not sure it is the compelling one; there are plenty of time-stressed people who still manage to squeeze writing into their days. It has to be something else. I have considered whether being in the "editor" mode (for a gross oversimplification) so much of the time dulls the creative edge. I have wondered whether reading so much bad - or perhaps more kindly underdeveloped - writing just puts me off engaging with writing altogether for periods of time. There might be some merit in these inquiries.

I have recently, however, been taken by a different theory, one related to these avenues but stemming also from this piece by Ira Glass (which I posted on the Original HKC some months back). Glass talked about how creators often have really good taste in their chosen area - video, painting, prose, whatever - which is why they are drawn to that field or idiom. But it is this same good taste which also tells them just how bad their own creative efforts in that arena are compared to what they know is possible; this can stifle the creative urge completely, as the artist is convinced (often rightly) that all they are creating is crap.

I wonder whether the English teacher is subject to an acute version of this syndrome. It probably goes without saying that an English teacher is likely a lover of words and a naturally verbal person, usually well-read with significant writing experience. Fine: we know good writing. But we also know bad writing, and not-as-good-as-it-could-be writing, and missed-it-by-that-much writing; we see it all the time, and we are trained and habituated to respond to it with direction, correction, advice, and assistance. This develops a critical perspective in both the good and bad senses of the word: sometimes I think an English teacher can't read anything without penciling it up.

And that obsession applies to our own stuff as well, creating a vicious cycle. Whatever I write, I'm just going to tear apart, because I know it's going to be awful. My taste is developed enough to know what good writing looks like and my attitude is such that I can't leave unfinished writing alone. I can't turn my internal censor off long enough to produce a sufficient amount of text to gain any traction, so I don't produce anything. Meanwhile, people without this overdeveloped sensitivity just go on writing and getting published, the lucky stiffs.

At least, that's my theory for this cobbler's-kids-go-shoeless phenomenon, of which I am not the only example. It'll do for now, and at least it gives me a strategy for response: working on turning off the censor. I need to believe that it's not just "those who can, do; those who cannot, teach," because if that were the case, I might have to give up teaching.

[pc monk] More like a monkey

It is the middle of the fifth week of the quarter, not quite fully mid-term, and yet I already feel that the summer has slipped away into the misty recesses of the past. And as with so many elements of our lives, I'm not sure that I fully appreciated how good I had it while it lasted.


The school year seems to have come on full force. Don't get me wrong; it's turning out to be (or at least starting out as) a good year. My schedule is fine, my students are great, and my institutional service responsibilities are pretty cool. There's nothing wrong with any of it; I love it all. There's just so much to love.

My first class wasn't until 3:30 pm, but I still got to campus today at 9:30 am. I spent the whole day sequestered in my office, making up lesson plans and grading papers; after teaching, I came home, had some ramen for dinner, and spent another few hours finishing off some more grading.

But this is not a woe-is-me-I'm-so-busy complaint about my job; as I say, I love what I am doing and feel lucky to be where I am. Rather, this is a reflection on what choices I have been making lately in response to the busy-ness.

Back in the summer, I had plenty of time for reflection, for reading books, and for trying to follow the zen practice of just doing one thing at a time. I should have realized how privileged I was - a whole thirteen weeks without work responsibilities, three months to focus on myself. It's really a bit embarrassing to consider how little progress I made in that time; it was almost as good as actually being in a monastery, after all. Now, it seems that I am all about the action rather than the reflection; it's do-do-do, whether for work or for play/chores/stuff when I am not working. I am not making time for stillness. It's been almost a month since my last post in this category; not much monking to share when I've only been monkeying around.

My morning runs help out a little; crunching my way through the dark is comforting and restorative, but as I have expressed before, not totally adequate. And running the path is not quite Walking the Path, at least not yet.

Part of the problem, I think, lies in the very nature of community college teaching itself. It is a very outward practice; a class is a high-energy enterprise, with all my attention focused on my students' needs and very little on my own, and a significant performance element. In that environment, it is easy to lose sight of one's center, to become concerned with the shell and not the core, to let the monkey-brain chatter on and on.

In the end, though, all this is by way of explanation rather than excuse. If finding a new level of self-awareness is important to me, I will find a way to make the time for it in my day and the space for it in my life. I will fish out and finish Natalie Goldberg, request Epicurus from the library and re-read it, and turn off the computer, put aside the stack of stuff to just sit, just be. Those blinds in my office go down as well as up; in six hours of desk time, there must be room for a little meditation, don't you think?

[jet city] Kickin' it old school

Wow - I've got lots of posts percolating, but none of them are fully brewed yet. Since I find myself, as I so often have in the past, out at a coffee shop, laptopping while Otis works, I thought I'd post an old-style "what's up" post just to keep the blog fresh.

So, in the midst of all this end-of-days, Second Great Depression, financial meltdown, failure of Randian objectivism, onset of creeping socialism, worldwide economic crisis stuff, has anyone noticed anything different in our quotidian lives? I mean, my pension plan is in the tank, but my salary hasn't changed, right? How does this affect us in the here-and now? I sure have noticed that my food bills have been going up over the past year - I track a few indicator species and have seen them go up and not come back down - but I don't think that has anything to do with this. Otis seems to have noticed a bit of a slowdown in her business recently, and I wonder if that's related to the psychological effects of all the bad financial news putting the brakes on consumer spending.

Our economics and business faculty up at Cascadia held a presentation Friday on the current financial situation and how it happened and what it all means. I wish I could have attended, but I was in Tacoma for training of a different kind: I attended the conference of the Washington State Community College Humanities Association. It was enlightening to hang out with and attend sessions from literature and history types as well as just composition and rhetoric folks; as I teach more and different classes, this broadening of my professional perspective is useful.

This WCCHA conference was also a nice counterpoint to the training I attended the prior week in North Bend; that session was much more nuts-and-bolts course planning, just as valuable but with a completely different (and more interdisciplinary) approach. This is turning into my Year of Professional Development, and if all the activities are as valuable as these have been, I'll be doing very well indeed.

I could say that the combination of professional education and the piles of grading that my courses generate (such as the one that I should be working on right now) keeps me from writing all the deep and insightful essays that should be filling up this space instead of these random ramblings, but that might be oversimplifying it a bit. There has still been time for fun and diversion as well.

Yesterday, a group of us convened at Johnbai's for a Saturday morning event: the price of admission was some sugary cereal and the main attraction was cartoons! In a fit of wistful nostalgia, the big man decided he wanted to recreate the happy memories of his youth, to wit, stuffing himself with oversweetened carbohydrates while lolling on the couch for hours watching animated mayhem. So that's exactly what we did, although in a sop to "adult" sensibilities, the cartoon of choice was The Venture Brothers, a mostly witty, slightly sophomoric, and sometimes smutty pastiche of Jonny Quest, the classic animated adventure series of the sixties. I must admit, I had to cut the sugar-only diet with a little protein in the form of vegetarian bacon, but I think we kept to the spirit of the event, anyway.

After too-many-hours-to-admit of indolence, the whole crew - Johnbai, O, Dingo, Soapy, Yojimbo, Otis and I - rejoined the human race by taking a nice walk to Volunteer Park in the afternoon. It was a nearly perfect day for taking in the fall foliage and the late-blooming dahlias - sunny and clear, with blue skies and crisp, cool air.

Later that evening, Otis and I watched Shirley Valentine, a pleasant British romance from 1989 about a 42-year-old woman rediscovering the joy of living. It was a nice counterpoint to Judge Dredd, the cartoonishly violent 1995 Sylvester Stallone vehicle (notable only for a rare (to me) action movie performance by Diane Lane), which we saw earlier in the week.

Maybe what I need to do to have a life and a blog is hire a ghost writer.

[sheepman] Blogging about blogging - venial division

In a RL conversation about blogging and this blog in particular, some questions were raised as the the relative opaqueness of some of the category titles I use. One one wag said, "I know four-color ma means comics, but I have no idea why." Here, then, is a bit of an explication that maybe reveals more about my sensibilities and idiosyncrasies than it illuminates the blog itself.

Plainclothes Monk: I think I made the monk part of this title pretty clear in the introduction post, but the plainclothes part might be more obscure. I was trying to get across the sense of my not being a formal adherent to any particular organized practice or, for that matter, not even a very strong practitioner of an individual system - a civilian, if you will, with, at most, some monkish leanings. Truth to tell, I am not perfectly satisfied with this title; I was looking for a dactyl (three syllables with the first accented) to place before monk, to get the euphony of Bulletproof Monk, but could not find a word that matched both the mood and the form.

Four-color Ma: Four-color has often been used as a shorthand for comics; it refers to the old-school coloring process for comic books. Back in the day, comics were printed with four plates, one for each CMYK ink (roughly blue, red, yellow, and black). In the old days, the only variable was how many dots of each ink would be applied, and the degrees of variation were only in 25% chunks. So a 75% blue and 25% yellow would get a green, and a 75% red and 25% yellow would get an orange. You can start tinkering around with the math and see how few colors they actually had to work with; this goes along way toward explaining the universally perceived sensibility of comics, so easily parodied in pop art.

The ma part is a little harder to explain. Ma is a Japanese word that means something like space or gap or distance or emptiness; used in discussing art, the closest equivalent might be negative space, but it's not exactly that. Ma is the sense that a house is not its walls, but the space enclosed by its walls; that a pitcher is not the clay, but the volume that the clay surrounds. It is an important concept in the minimalist/formalist Japanese arts such as ikebana, kabuki, and calligraphy. It resonated with me as an important concept regarding comics, which were called by Scott McCloud "The Invisible Art." McCloud expressed in Understanding Comics that much of the art of comics happens in the gutters - that space between the panels that hold the drawings and the words. It is in that gap, that emptiness, that space, that the reader's imagination completes the art begun by the cartoonist. To me, that sounds a lot like ma.

Disclaimer: As Lou said to Bud, I don't even know what I'm talking about. After I do more (and more significant) research, I may have a whole post just on ma.

Rhythmic Gymnastics with Apparatus: This is a shout-out to my favorite event of the summer Olympics; I am using it here as the avatar for all cool and quirky pop culture. Wikipedia says that this is "a sport in which single competitors or pairs, trios or even more (generally five) manipulate one or two apparatus: rope, hoop, ball, clubs and ribbon. Rhythmic Gymnastics [...] combines elements of ballet, gymnastics, theatrical dance, and apparatus manipulation." What this really means is that you can watch some girl take a hula hoop, throw it in the air with all her might, do a tumbling routine across the floor, and then spring up and extend her arm, without looking, just in time for the hoop to fall right into it, like she was Captain America recovering his mighty shield. There's nothing cooler or quirkier than that.

Men in Skirts: I deliberately chose a title for this category that was provocative in regards to gender constructs, since that is where discussions of kilt-wearing often lead. I wish I could say that it was my invention, but the Metropolitan Museum of Art had a special exhibition some years ago called Bravehearts: Men in Skirts. The museum addressed more than just Utilikilts in their show, but it was also focused on "skirts as a means of injecting novelty into male fashion, as a means of transgressing moral and social codes, and as a means of redefining an ideal masculinity." It seems to fit, and it gets me a lot of hits.

Blockhead Rhetoric: This is the name of my "business" of grant writing, editing, and private writing instruction. It seemed important to be to develop this enterprise when I was an adjunct teacher, but I soon was teaching almost more classes than I could handle, so it fell by the wayside. Now, on the tenure-track, I don't have the time or energy to restart it, but in a year or so, who knows? The name itself comes from a quotation of Samuel Johnson, the legendary writer, literary critic, and originator of the first English language dictionary: No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for the money. I thought it captured my relationship to writing on several different levels: the sense that I am a task- and audience-oriented writer, rather than a creative writer; the connection between writing and commerce (including grants there); and a little bit of self-deprecation (I hope). I don't know if it's the best business name, but then I have never been a very good entrepreneur anyway.

Jet City: Did you know that way back when, in the previous century, the Boeing Company, a Chicago aerospace firm, actually had its corporate headquarters in Seattle? It's true! In fact, before computers, coffee, and microbrews, Seattle was an aviation town through-and-through, a city whose economic and cultural fortunes were tied to the rise and fall of the aeronautics industry. Really! Ask some old folks, they'll tell you.

The Sheepman: This category title is pure pun, the lowest form of humor: idle thinking is woolgathering right, so sheep, wool, sheepman -- get it? Yeah, I know. But it's also a shout-out to one of my favorite movies, The Sheepman, starring Glenn Ford and Shirley McClaine. It's a whimsical little film, with Ford as a reluctant sheepherder and McClaine as the woman of dubious virtue who becomes his ally in a sheep-cow conflict, but it's less about plot and more about character, with fun lines like this exchange between McClaine and Ford:

--Was he very bad?
--Well, let's just say that he wasn't in any danger of getting a headache from the weight of all the gold stars on his crown.

Well, I like it. And its lightweight nature makes it a perfect label for lightweight posts.

Like this one.

[apparatus] Pot shots

Well, it has been a bit of a bleary Sunday. I woke up tired and my cold is still hanging on, so I have been stumbling through an uneventful day, punctuating it with naps. I just finished grading some papers and that took the last of my coherence, so here's a smattering of pop culture updates and new items.

This new functionality of GMail is intended to prevent incoherence of a different sort: it's called Mail Goggles, and in an effort to curb drunk emailing, it requires you to do a few math calculations before you are allowed to send email. I think we can all point to a few occasions, perhaps some recent, when this might have come in handy.

This might seem incoherent, but it's true: individually wrapped slices of peanut butter for convenience in sandwich cuisine.

This might have been more coherent alongside the Flintstones clip from a few days ago, but here's a cool people-powered vehicle. (Related update: another people-powered craft didn't fare so well on its journey.)

Finally, when your crossword puzzle has turned into nothing more than an incoherent collection of letters, you can turn to this handy tool.

Bonus debate: The question arose recently of why Samuel L. Jackson has the reputation and cred that he does, considering that, in the opinion of some, his career has consisted only of overdone performances in bad movies. In order to shed light on this pressing question, I went through the IMDb and put together this list of Mr. Jackson's movies, leaving out his television, video game, and voice work. Take a look and judge for yourself: is this the oeuvre of the gritty Olivier, the finest actor of his generation - or just the resume of hack? Let us know via the poll on the main page and your comments.
Update: poll removed 10/21/08.

Lakeview Terrace (2008)
Iron Man (2008)
Jumper (2008)
Cleaner (2007)
1408 (2007)
Resurrecting the Champ (2007)
Home of the Brave (2006)
Black Snake Moan (2006)
Snakes on a Plane (2006)
Freedomland (2006)
The Man (2005)
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)
xXx: State of the Union (2005)
Coach Carter (2005)
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
Twisted (2004/I) .
Country of My Skull (2004) .
S.W.A.T. (2003) .
Basic (2003)
xXx (2002)
The House on Turk Street (2002)
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)
Changing Lanes (2002)
The Comeback (2002)
The 51st State (2001)
The Caveman's Valentine (2001)
Unbreakable (2000) .
Shaft (2000)
Rules of Engagement (2000) .
Any Given Wednesday (2000)
Deep Blue Sea (1999)
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) .
Violon rouge, Le (1998)
The Negotiator (1998)
Out of Sight (1998)
Sphere (1998)
Jackie Brown (1997)
Eve's Bayou (1997)
One Eight Seven (1997)
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
A Time to Kill (1996)
Trees Lounge (1996)
The Great White Hype (1996)
Sydney (1996)
Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995)
Kiss of Death (1995/I)
Losing Isaiah (1995)
The Search for One-eye Jimmy (1994)
The New Age (1994)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Hail Caesar (1994)
Fresh (1994)
True Romance (1993)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Menace II Society (1993)
Amos & Andrew (1993)
Loaded Weapon 1 (1993)
Fathers & Sons (1992)
Patriot Games (1992)
White Sands (1992)
Juice (1992)
Jumpin' at the Boneyard
Strictly Business (1991)
Johnny Suede (1991)
Jungle Fever (1991)
The Return of Superfly (1990)
Goodfellas (1990)
The Exorcist III (1990)
Mo' Better Blues (1990)
Betsy's Wedding (1990)
Def by Temptation (1990)
A Shock to the System (1990)
Sea of Love (1989)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Coming to America (1988)
School Daze (1988) .... Leeds
Magic Sticks (1987) (as Sam Jackson) .... Bum
Ragtime (1981)
Together for Days (1972)

[4-color ma] Art for Art's sake

I got back home just a little while ago from an author talk at Town Hall here in Seattle by Art Spiegelman. He's on tour promoting his new book Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@*&! (Pantheon). I have never had the pleasure of hearing Spiegelman speak in person before, and I must say I was not disappointed tonight.

Breakdowns: Portrait... is another oversize artifact, similar to Shadow of No Towers. The text includes a full reproduction of the original Breakdowns, a 1977 volume collecting various stories, including the original three-page "Maus." This softcover comic book/magazine is bound within a new hard cover, sandwiched between a comics-style preface and a prose afterward with illustrations. The book falls somewhere between a memoir, a retrospective, and a sampler.

Spiegelman's presentation had pretty much the same tone, overlaid with a generous frosting of formalism. Working with a somewhat wonky Powerpoint system, he moved through various examples of his work - and some from other creators - to briefly outline the history of comics, show the development of "personal statement" comics from "disposable entertainment," cover his own development as an artist, and give a few lessons in page design, panel composition, and image apprehension along the way.

If you have are interested in Speigelman's work or just comics in general, I would strongly recommend taking in one of his appearances if he's coming your way. The Comics Reporter published his tour schedule; check it out for a town near you.

Some highlights from tonight:

Spiegelman didn't smoke during his presentation; he said it was because it was Yom Kippur, but I think it may have been anti-tobacco Seattle that did him in.

I was intrigued by Speigelman's assertion that even working as an artist, he was constantly aware that his finished object was the printed page; the original art means little or nothing. He said that now, working with a computer more and more, there is often no original page, as he compiles pieces of art from different physical sources to make the comics page.

In the Q&A, Spiegelman gave one of the clearest and most succinct explanations of the coloring process for comics that I have ever encountered.

I puffed up a little bit when I heard Speigelman echo my own opinion of Persepolis. Like me, he thought that the movie was actually superior to the book, which he said "didn't engage enough with the grammar of comics to suit [him]." This is what I have said about Satrapi's comics work since I first picked it up: she has some great stories to tell, but doesn't seem to utilize the form in the most effective ways to tell that story. I think in the end, there's little doubt that Spiegelman lives in Scott McCloud's Formalist tribe.

Finally, the dumbest possible way to start off the interactive part of a Spiegelman talk might be to ask him why he used mice to represent Jews, especially if your utterance in toto is "So, in Maus, why rats?" This is even more especially true if his talk has included a pictorial reminiscence of the germination of that very idea. Somebody did this, and the room shuddered with embarrassment for him. Spiegelman declined to answer the question.

[sheepman] Running shorts

When I run Green Lake in the mornings, I almost always run clockwise. Those familiar with the lake know that the counterclockwise route is actually more scenic; because of the relationship of the path tho the shoreline, there are more and better scenic vistas to be had on a counterclockwise journey. Yet, I run clockwise, and save the counterclockwise route for walking.

In this habit, I have come to the conclusion that either almost nobody else runs the lake clockwise, or that these potential runners all run at the same speed as I do. On my circuit of the lake, I encounter a lot of people coming at me, both walking and running, and I pass a lot of walkers heading in the same direction I am, but I neither pass nor am passed by other runners, except rarely.

Encountering people coming at me is an interesting mathematical pattern of its own. If our circuits overlap enough, I meet walkers twice: they cover about one-third of the route in the time I cover about two-thirds, so I can see them once shortly after I start and once shortly before I end. Counterclockwise runners I see only once, unless we happened to have started together and meet up at the finish line from opposite directions, or they are really fast, as fast relative to me as I am to a walker. Both those exceptions are very rare; I see a lot of runners coming at me, but rarely see them again the same day.

Runners moving clockwise, however, are even fewer and farther between. Most of the time, I make it all the way around the lake without hearing the crunch of gravel behind me that speaks of someone gaining; even less frequently do I see any running figure before me to pull up alongside and pass. Usually I think that I am the only person running this particular route, but sometimes I can convince myself there are perhaps six of us, spaced evenly around the lake a half-mile apart, constantly out of each other's sight, even along the open, sweeping curves stripped of their summer foliage. We must be launched like pinballs from the community center walkway at even, mechanical intervals.

Of course, as I was thinking these very thoughts on my run this morning, a blonde woman in a red long-sleeved top and black running tights made a liar out of me, coming up on my left in the slowly brightening morning light and moving effortlessly ahead of me. I recalled having seen her stretching near the very start of my route, and wondered how long a head start she had given me before running me down.

On the occasions when I am passed, I try to pace the person who passes me, not in any competitive way, but in the same manner that mariners would pace their vessels against floating logs: there is no race against the log, just information about the context of the speed of the ship. Sometimes when running I fall into reverie and my pace slows; the crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch of another runner can wake me up, and my 1-2-3-4 mantra of "pick-up-your-feet" becomes renewed and revitalized. Occasionally, I have stayed with my companions for however long our paths overlap, matching their strides and feeling the changes in my lungs and legs in response to the different pace.

Sometimes, however, like this morning, the newcomer is clearly a faster runner, and I just watch as the distance between us grows and grows as their steps eat up the ground in bigger bites than I can take. Trying to match them would be fruitless exercise and counter to my reasons for running in the first place.

I feel neither proud of nor embarrassed by either outcome; we're all just doing what we need to do to walk - or run - our own Paths. Mine goes clockwise, usually alone, and I like it just fine that way.

[jet city] Pre-celebration

October birthday celebrations are often a group affair here in the collective. Last year was my half-century, and everyone made a big deal of it (thanks again!), but this year the was no such fete, just a day off.



Otis and I managed to play the day away despite the rainy skies. We started with breakfast out, at the Atlas in University Village. This one of the restaurants run by the folks who have the 5-Spot, Coastal Kitchen, and some other places; it wasn't bad.

We took a break from fun to do some grocery shopping, and then headed over to Cap Hill to hang at Half Price Books, where I got some goodies, seen here. (I think that HPB stores, particularly the Cap Hill locations, are overlooked gems in this city - I could spend all day there sometimes.)

The afternoon found us at the Egyptian for a matinee of Sukiyaki Western Django, a totally cool, brutal and lyrical Japanese spaghetti western. If you liked Tears of the Black Tiger, you'll love this.

We managed to squeeze in dinner with Johnbai and Soapy before heading home for quiet evening, punctuated by a latenight (homemade-by-Otis) coffee cake with a single candle.

Yay!

[4-color ma] A veritable cornucopia

Today was a day off for me, and I spent the day with my honey wandering around in the beautiful Seattle rain having fun and acquiring comics stuff - and I never even went near a comics shop!



The first acquisition is actually not comics, and I didn't get it today (oh, I'm such a liar, amn't I?) but it's still pretty cool. A pal who was visiting London last month came back with this purchase from used book stall:

It looks a lot like a typical mystery paperback, but it's actually a 64-page pamphlet, #520 in the Sexton Blake Library published by Fleetway House and available for one shilling (or 30/- for a one year subscription). Apparently, the series began in the late nineteenth century and was still going strong at least into the early sixties, when this issue came.

It interested me not as comics per se, of course - the entire thing is straight prose - but because of the appearance of the text artifact itself. It's bound just like an old 80-page giant, although it's about the size of a standard pocketbook, and the cover (at least to me) carries more of the sensibility of a periodical than a book. But it was the inside front cover that really rang some bells:

Not only does the subscription pitch remind me of my old comics, but the tower of floating heads on the left looks just like the rosters found on old JLA-JSA crossover covers, doesn't it? I don't know how deeply these similarities can be taken, but it seems at least a little significant.

The actual first acquisition from today also involves the JLA - and the JSA, as a matter of fact. In our wandering, we stopped at a local Half Price Books, one which has an excellent comics section (they even bundle miniseries and runs). I found a couple of old DC Elseworld books that I had never seen, including

Batman: Scar of the Bat (1996): Batman versus Al Capone
Justice Riders (1997): The JLA in the old west
JLA: Age of Wonder (2003) Steampunk superheroes (I could only find #2 of the two-book mini.)
JSA: The Unholy Three (2003) Batman, Hourman, and Superman versus the KGB in a Cold War thriller

(What can I say? I've always been a sucker for alternate histories, and alternate fantasies are sort of the same thing, right?)

I've only had a chance to sample Justice Riders, and I must say that I was mighty pleased. Sheriff Diana Prince goes the Magnificent Seven route to enlist help to confront railroad baron Maxwell Lord, who destroyed her town, Paradise. Her crew comprises Kid Flash, a fast gun (in more ways than one); Katar Johnson, a hawk shaman from the Nations; John Jones, a mysterious bounty-hunter type; Booster Gold, a Maverick-style itinerant gambler; and Beetle, a Vernesian inventor. The party is rounded out by the less-than-willing ally Pinkerton agent Guy Gardner as they take on clockwork gunmen, killer locomotives, and Felix Faust.

Chuck Dixon provides a snappy, albeit formulaic, tale, and JH Williams III and Mick Gray provide compelling graphics that mix solid panel layouts with some catchy graphic design:

I just love when competent creators get a chance to play with characters without the need for everything to be shoehorned into continuity through parallel worlds or hypertime or whatever. Elsewords provided those opportunities; I thought they were a great idea and I'm glad to be discovering some lost gems.

My next acquisition was better than half-price - it was free from a book-sharing shelf, and quite an unusual find it is. You might remember the little kerfuffle about Sharp Teeth, the "graphic novel without the pictures" that was essentially an epic poem. Well, get a load of this:

The Superman Poem by Car-El Waluconis (Robotic Bear Press)

Now, this is a graphic novel without pictures and without a doubt an epic poem - and I do mean old-style epic. Here's an excerpt (click to epic-size):

I haven't had a chance to do more than leaf through it, but it seems to be one long adventure, beginning with the death of Krypton and moving though Clark's years in Smallville, his move to Metropolis, and encounters with Luthor and Lois Lane. And while I'm no expert on classical poetry (it's been over thirty years since I read the Aeneid in high school), "Car-El" does seem to be mimicking the style of most English translations of Homer and Virgil and using iambic pentameter. In any case, it scores lots of points for uniqueness alone. It might be hard to find, but if you come across a copy, take a look.

My last acquisition was also free and much more directly related to comics. My honey gifted me with a copy of The Best American Comics 2008 from Houghton Mifflin. Lynda Barry is the editor this year, and the collection includes some of may favorites, such as Rick Geary, Alison Bechtel, Jaime Hernandez, and Gene Luen Yang. Even more important than the specifics of this edition alone is the news that Jessica Abel and Matt Madden are now the series editors, ensuring a high-quality publication for the foreseeable future. I have the 2006 book; I guess I need to get the 2007 collection to complete my run.

[jet city] Liveblogging the VP debate - NOT

We're sitting at home tonight with the Palin-Biden debate glowing on the big wall, but this is not a liveblog, although if you want one, you can go here. I'm trying not even to watch. No, I'm just having a chat with my peeps.


This quarter sure started up fast! It seems that I'm reading papers and conferencing with students and going to meetings and getting assigned to campus-wide projects and all that. This isn't in Blockhead Rhetoric because it really isn't about teaching, its just about being a busy guy again. I'm getting used to my schedule and am happy that it leaves me time to continue my running in the morning. It's just a wonder how much I have to do when, for the first time in a long time, I'm only working one job! I guess this tenure-track increase-of-responsibility thing is a real phenomenon, not just a myth. At any rate, I feel busy, but good-busy.

The busy-ness at work is part of a larger picture of "hunkering down" for the gray season. There's less time for being out and about during the daylight, and sunset is coming along sooner every day, so a lot of the focus is moving to at-home or low-key activities. I'll have a lot of nights at homegarding, that's for sure, but I'm really looking forward to the upcoming D&D campaign; I get a lot of satisfaction out of those regular get-togethers. I don't know what other kind of ongoing moveable feast we may cook up for the dark times; it's been so long that I've gone to the movies, maybe I'll be able to start a regular Crest night again.

Just some gossipy stuff: JJ is in town for her birthday today, although she will not be able to attend Librapalooza. Another early Libran is FarmerScott, who kicked off October birthdays on the first, and my birth-twin (if you adjust for time zones) K of Monmouth is celebrating hers today. (And thanks to Dingo for her birthday wishes to me today - a day early, but still welcome!) In non-birthday news, Dar-Dar Binks had a little yard sale t'other day, the first step in her decampment from Cap Hill to the wilds of Ballard. I believe O is soon on her way back to visit her ancestral homelands in America's breadbasket; bon voyage! Wheylona has been pretty quiet lately, but it seems she's back on the air, so head over to Viva and give her some love.

And here's a smiley picture of Otis to take us home.