Twenty-first century schizoid man.
Blogging is a fragmentary, contradictory enterprise. (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.) Even the most laser-like focus can’t help but skip trippingly from this to that to yonder, over there—hold tight, the world spins on a dime and everything’s different tomorrow. (I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.) A blog that’s little more than spontaneous eruptions of verbiage, linchinography on the fly, seems even more addlepated. (Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?) Morsels of meaning, concatenations of confidences strung like chronological pearls—before swine? Perhaps, but think of Hen Wen—there’s a pretense to or at least an expectation of coherence, of a logical, integral flow, neatly parceled stone to stone from here to there. We may not step in the same river twice, but we at least expect the temperature to be consistent, the bottom to feel much the same, the current just about as strong as it was when last we wet our toes. (Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?)
Last night I howled in outrage; today, I’m looking forward to APE.
If you’re going to be in San Francisco this weekend and you’re at all curious about the current state of comics-as-art (and how comics-as-industry is slowly coming to realize its potential even as it shoots itself in the foot with mad abandon), I humbly suggest you take some time Saturday or Sunday for a trip down to the Concourse Exhibition Center at Showplace Square, 620 7th Street. (I’d be a bit more effusive, but it’s going to be my first trip. But Howard Cruse will be there. How can you pass up the opportunity to meet Howard Cruse? And buy his books?) —Jenn is there to promote Dicebox, and is sharing a table with Bruno’s own Chris Baldwin: Table No. 297, or so I’m told. Back near the restrooms. Look for “Baldwin and Lee” on the exhibitor-list-booklet-map thingie. If she’s busy sketching for fans and he’s busy schlepping his books, I’ll be the guy with the Vandyke and the closely cropped hair telling you in no uncertain terms why reading Dicebox (and Bruno) whenever possible will clear up your complexion, increase the size of your secondary sexual characteristics, and guarantee a crushing defeat for the Bush/Cheney junta in 2004.
—Also: a double handful of Mostly Acquisitions available for sale and, if you’re lucky, personal appearances at the table by Erika Moen and Jen Wang, two of the six of Pants Press.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
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