Halo halo

Nick Gazin:  I guess I also draw a lot of naked ladies and try to understand the nature of drawing women and how people who make art are often socially weird. Charles Schulz’s biography talked about how he would get crushes on “distant princesses.” Have you had anyone tell you they were upset that Dark Horse was representing Manara?

Diana Schutz:  Uh… no. Other than your friend who “angrily dismissed him.” Look, anyone who spends every day in a room all by himself writing and drawing Stuff That Isn’t Real is almost by definition tapped into something that the rest of us—with our mundane, workaday schedules, our grinding commutes, and our ceaseless barrage of meaningless business communications—just can’t begin to understand. Is Milo socially inept? No, he’s a fucking genius. People like him live in a different world than the rest of us.

(Robert Swanson picture via Golden Age Comic Book Stories)

Here is the crux of the problem, the single greatest obstacle to American literature today: guilt. Guilt leads to the idea that all writing is self-indulgence. Writers, feeling guilty for not doing real work, that mysterious activity—where is it? On Wall Street, at Sloane-Kettering, in Sudan?—turn in shame to the notion of writing as “craft.” (If art is aristocratic, decadent, egotistical, self-indulgent, then craft is useful, humble, ascetic, anorexic—a form of whittling.) “Craft” solicits from them constipated “vignettes”—as if to say: “Well, yes, it’s bad, but at least there isn’t too much of it.” As if writing well consisted of overcoming human weakness and bad habits. As if writers became writers by omitting needless words.

American novelists are ashamed to find their own lives interesting; all the rooms in the house have become haunted, the available subjects have been blocked off.

— Elif Batuman, n+1, 1 June 2006

“For the Euro-American demographic there is a great disturbance in the Force.  A bit like Darth Vader’s family crisis.  His son, his ex-droid, his future son-in-law, and his future son-in-law’s Wookiee are all coming to rescue his daughter. Stay tuned.”

— “Lynda” on citizenism versus white nationalism

(photographs via Joho345 and Shorpy)

Malcolm Gladwell:  Here’s another example: We now have pretty good epidemiological evidence that the long-term health consequences of playing in the National Football League are considerable. The life expectancy for former NFL players is 20 years lower than it is for the general public. Part of that is due to the type of person that plays football. But a big part of that is also due to the consequences of playing football: concussions, and the raft of health issues that come with being obese, which — let’s face it — the NFL basically requires most players to be. This is the kind of issue that, say, the companies who ran coal mines dealt with 50 years ago. And yet somehow the NFL — which has a thousand times more resources than coal companies ever did — gets to pretend this problem doesn’t exist. Huh?

Bill Simmons:  Now you’re triggering parts of my brain that I didn’t know even existed.

“But the real problem was the indexing system, and it is still the problem with facial recognition systems as an identification tool. There are a lot of advantages to facial recognition because you can do it surreptitiously, and people don’t have to cooperate. But the face becomes a difficult thing to classify and convert into quantitative information. You end up just measuring the distances between features, and it’s just not the most discriminating kind of measurement, compared with irises or fingerprints or DNA.”

— Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology @ UC Irvine, as interviewed by Errol Morris

“Cuz you know, she went crazy in the ’60s, I think it was the ’60s, when she tried to kill somebody. So she was institutionalized for a while, and then she got religion. I think she just had her picture taken so much, that it drove her insane. But guess what? She had the most perfect body and the cutest face of all in that pinup era of the 1940s and 1950s. She was the gold standard. There was nobody superior to her physically. And her poses, she always looked cheerful and wholesome, she never looked sleazy. It didn’t matter if she was posing in a sadomasochistic setup with those high heel boots and whips, it always looks like it’s just a funny game to her, you know?”

— R. Crumb