In my mail from Bonnie Bendon Campbell, a pointer to a Maggie Larson cartoon in the 12/4 New Yorker and to Michael Maslin’s Inkspill column about that issue:
(#1) From the 12/4/17 New Yorker, the first issue with more women artists than men
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Maggie Larson and New Yorker women
December 25, 2017The power of the pen
December 25, 2017Zippy continues his visit to North Carolina — yesterday Salisbury, today Charlotte — with Xmas pleasure and puzzlement about the antique technologies of pen and paper:
(#1)
The public art work is The Writer’s Desk (2005, by Larry Kirkland) at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Library: a bronze quill pen in an inkwell at the top of a stack of books, surrounded by typewriter keys, pencils, and hand stamps.
Easter Island holiday
December 25, 2017Dan Piraro’s Xmas card today, from the vast emptiness of the southeastern Pacific:
(#1)
(This could also be seen as Christmas in Chile, since Easter Island belongs to Chile.)
Salisbury NC 60, 70 years ago
December 24, 2017Today’s Zippy takes us to the middle South (the middle of North Carolina, in fact) and to the 1940s and 1950s:
(#1)
Griffy and Zippy are focused on the building and on the Cheerwine advertised on one side of it (the other side advertises the ubiquitous Coca Cola). Shmoo toys and Rinso detergent come into it, evoking the late 1940s and the early 1950s. Along the way, notes on names: Cheerwine, Rinso, Solium. And then a final note on the location of Salisbury NC.
Memory and the power of diner food
December 22, 2017Yesterday’s Zippy (“The flying bucket on Sepulveda”) took us to Dinah’s Fried Chicken on Sepulveda Blvd. in LA. Today, Zippy continues the narrative with remembrances of diner foods past — rice pudding, creamed spinach, corned beef hash — and their ability to evoke specific moments from times gone by:
(#1)
The day when Zippy spilled ketchup on his styrofoam shoes at Dinah’s; the day when Dinah’s ran out of rice pudding and substituted creamed spinach; Marcel Marceau’s recollection of May 14th, 1894 in Fresno CA, a memory triggered by just a whiff of corned beef hash.
All of this is just absurd if you don’t know about Marcel Proust, the madeleines, Remembrance of Things Past, and involuntary memory; in case you’ve forgotten, the title, “Remembrance of Flings Past” is there to nudge your memory. All this Proustian stuff comes from high culture, but like other Great Books, Great Art, and Great Music, it’s worked its way into a pop-culture meme that anyone can use for jokes and that everybody’s supposed to recognize.
The flying bucket on Sepulveda
December 21, 2017Today’s Zippy offers tasty chicken on Sepulveda — no, not sultry young men, but actual fried poultry:
(#1)
That would be the orginal Dinah’s Fried Chicken, aka Dinah’s Family Restaurant, at 6521 S Sepulveda Blvd., LA. Where you can get that deep-fried feeling, as a star of movies and tv.
Is that all there is? Just platypi and clichés?
December 19, 2017Today’s Zippy has our Pinhead hero trading diner thoughts with a Pinhead named Nesbitt:
For two panels, Zippy spouts the idea that nothing represents, or stands for, something else; things are what they are, and that’s all there is. Meanwhile, Nesbitt runs through two idioms that he thinks of as clichés (rock s.o.’s world, takeaway), and the pair ping-pong plural platypi.
From the archives of avoidance
December 19, 2017In a One Big Happy from 11/18, Ruthie and Joe pester their dad for using the word blackmail:
The kids understand the black of blackmail to be a reference to (in brief) Americans descended from enslaved people of sub-Saharan Africa, and they’ve been taught at school that the only proper, correct, etc. term for referring to such people is African American.
Moby Chick, Moby Duck, Moby Dip
December 17, 2017
Xmas, Zippy, Sartre, the Big Duck, and Nedwig, too
December 16, 2017It started to look a lot like Christmas back at the end of October, and now the great wave of celebration impels us towards the day. I have my personal holiday dates: the 15th of December, for years my evacuation day from Ohio (immediately after grades were due at Ohio State); the 20th, my arrival day in California, by then transformed from dry-season gold to the rainy-season green of rebirth; the 16th, today, marking for me not only the birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven but also the birthday of my friend Ned Deily, a day I came to see as Nedwig, by association the feast day of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. (Extended discussion of these significant events in my 12/17/16 posting “Two late December holidays”.)
Meanwhile, Bill Griffith has several times connected the coming of Christmas with Jean-Paul Sarte and the Big Duck of Flanders NY (on Long Island), and here I’ll follow him a bit along that rocky, twisted path. Enjoy the journey with me.