Hey ma, can you see me on the radio?

That was the Sonata program on Melbourne's RRR station. Okay, now back to norbal. Some folk were asking about art sales recently. I hope to have some news on that front in a day or two, as I've lodged all the Black Diamond art with a responsible trader. Watch this spot.

Talking statues

Melbourne has a few examples of humorous sculpture around the city. Here's one the skinny blokes, and me. I'm the talking one.


I see this kind of thing all around the world, like the bronze suitcase in the central rail station in Madrid, if it's still there. And I find myself thinking about the fate of sculpture in public spaces over the last thirty years, such as Serra's Tilted arc that was put in front of the Federal Government building in Manhattan in 1981 and after much public contoversy, removed in 1989. It was intended 'to alter and dislocate the decorative function of the plaza', cost $175,000 to erect, $35,000 to dimantle, and $50,000 to re-erect in another location.
Melbourne has a similar story (I'm sure most cities do): Vault, more popularly know as The Yellow Peril, a sculpture erected in 1980 at a cost of $70,000 and, after much controversy, moved the following year. Here is an article titled What the sculpture said:

The sculpture, however, was not banished from the City Square simply because people didn’t like it, but because a group of Councillors finally won the debate that Vault was not appropriate to the City Square of Melbourne. Vault, it was decided then, did not represent the aspirations of Melbourne for its City Square, did not say the things they wanted it to say...
Vault, as a sculpture in public, was not only contemporary in its style, material, construction and colour, it did not tell Australian stories. Melbourne was faced with a new type of public sculpture that spoke in a different way.

Perhaps the real problem was that its big blank spaces were an invitation to scrawl slogans, such as the one for 'JOBS NOW' in this old photo:


I am inevitably and mischievously reminded of the tradition of the Talking Statues of Rome. "In 1501 Cardinal Oliviero Carafa put in a small square near Piazza Navona the battered torso of a statue representing Menelaus with the body of Patroclus. Each year on April 25 the Cardinal chaired a sort of Latin literary competition and poems were posted on the statue and occasionally this happened outside the competition period." In this way Pasquino (the name given to the statue, said to be after a well known deformed dwarf) became the first talking statue of Rome. The trick was to sneak out under cover of dark and paste your inflamatory verses or satirical squibs onto the shapeless lump. At one stage the Pope wanted to chuck it in the Tiber to put an end to the mockeries. When guards were put on the statue, the practice was relocated to the colossal staue of a river god at the foot of Capitol Hill. This one was named Marforio and the whole thing became more interesting as Pasquino and Marforio started having conversations. A mutilated colossal priestess of Isis became known as Madam Lucrezia and added a female voice to the comedy.
I love this one:

Via del Babbuino (Baboon) is named after an old statue of a Silenus, which was referred to in derogatory terms as il Babbuino. Its location in the Strangers' Quarter of Rome made it an alternative site for posting pasquinades without a high risk of being caught. Il Babbuino was also used by the large community of foreigners living in the area for lampooning members of the community.

(lots of photos at the link.) update. edit to fix mistake caught by second commenter.

Melb 3

I was on a panel yesterday with two ladies much older than myself, and most of the audience too. Not sure I talked very many of them into coming over to the dark side. When these old school literary types sign books, I noticed that they have no concept of making that scrawl on the titlepege into an attractive visual flourish. And, perhaps recalling blue carbon papers, they lean very hard with their ballpoint, otherwise you won't be able to still see the imprint on page nine.

In Melbourne, me.

Flew out yesterday. Stopped to get book out of bag as the wife of my bosom approached the check-in desk. Looked up and followed her halfway towards the security gate before realising it was the wife of someone else's bosom wearing a similar coat. A McCauley Culkin moment. Anne was at the check-in desk shouting "oi! Where do you think you're going?".
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panel with Nicki Greenberg went very well.

The Sunday Age.

The article in the Melbourne newspaper The Age came out as well as could be expected. That's the glamorous Nicki Greenberg on the cover. They've made it look like the slug character is feeling her bum, intentionally I presume.


The subject was the lead feature with a spread and a full page. You won't be able to read it here. I'll link later if I find an online version.


My piece took up most of the third page. You might be able to click and enlarge it enough to follow its drift.


Shaun Tan, Bruce Mutard and Bernard Caleo got honorable mentions.

"The name in a hundred indexes"

I think I put my foot in it. I have gotten into the habit of avoiding being stuck on panel discussions with comicbook people. Last year I was asked to be on a radio program in a three way discussion with the nitwit who put on the "Heroes and Villains" show of Australian comic art at the State Library of Victoria, and I said I'd only be in it if they wanted to talk to me on my own. So it didn't happen. Now, with the Melbourne Writers festival I decided to head off any of this 'gang' mentality (let's invite a gang of 'graphic novelists') by saying I'd much rather find myself talking to real authors about books and life instead of 'What is a goddamn graphic novel, part 2,479'. So now I'm on a panel with the immensely illustrious Victoria Glendinning and Brenda Niall, who have both written significant biographies of historical literary figures. Campbell is oot o' his depth and in a state of agitation. I'm reading Glendinning's book on Leonard Woolf in preparation for this adventure:

Leonard and Lytton agreed to write each other once a week, and to keep each other's letters. What they both had in mind already was posterity. When Leonard came to write about his college years in Sowing, he was nearly eighty years old. Thoby Stephen was dead. Lytton Strachey was dead. Saxon Sydney-Turner was dead. Clive Bell was dead. Maynard Keynes was dead. G.E.Moore was dead. Their names were and are famous for whatever it is that each of them became famous for. (Saxon is famous for being their friend. His is the name in a hundred indexes.)

oh to be the name in a hundred indexes!

(Here's an interview: The lady vanishes- Aug 18- Sydney Morning Herald.)
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MY BLOG is nothing important. It doesn't even talk about big stuff. Just books mostly, and according to a recent survey, One in four Americans read no books last year -Guardian Unlimited -(AP)- Aug 22.

But this pece by Michael Skube, Blogs: All the noise that fits- LA Times-Aug 19, dismisses the entire blogosphere as worthless.

Jay Rosen retaliates in the same paper on Aug 22-The journalism that bloggers actually do.-
In an email exchange, the author tells Marshall, "I didn't put your name into the piece and haven't spent any time on your site." Huh? Turns out an editor stuck Marshall's name in there because the column didn't have enough examples in it. Skube agreed to the script change, but this meant he had no idea what his character was saying.
Dan Gillmor, a former newspaper man, calls it "journalistic malpractice." And it is that. Also pedagogical buffoonery. In Skube's columns, there's a teacher who doesn't believe in doing his homework - any homework.
So I did it for him. I asked friends in the blogosphere to help me put together a list of examples that would confound Skube if he knew of them, but possibly interest his students. Blog sites doing exactly what he says blog sites don't do: "the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence ... the depiction of real life."
He follows with an impressive list of journalistic achievements within the blogosphere.
(via Mark Evanier)
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Use of the speech bubble in business logo: Trevor Elliott lines up sixty examples.: Here is just a fraction of what’s going down out there in Web Bubble Logo Land. This is what happens when the perfect symbol, a symbol so good that it does all the thinking for you, gets together with a sea of designers who aren’t thinking enough.
(link via Journalista)
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It's all sunny, except outside it's still raining.

Melbourne's newspaper The Age, the sunday magazine insert, M , is doing a feature on the presence of the 'graphic novel' in the Melbourne Writers' Festival this year. They've interviewed me and Nicki Greenberg. She's been photographed for the front cover and superimposed against blow-ups of her characters, and I was commissioned to do a full page in colour for inside. It's a 12 panel autobiographical job, and that's a small detail enlarged on the left. It's in the style of the Fate of the Artist. So let's cross fingers and hope that it all comes out right, as you never know whether mainstream mags are goint to 'get it'. But Editor Michelle Griffin interviewed me for the Australian back in 2001 when she was a freelance journalist and that came out very well, so I'm hopeful. There's certainly room to write an optimistic piece on the subect vis a vis this country. With my First Second books distributed over here by MacMillan (my self-published books have never really been on sale outside of the comicbook specialty shops), with Nicki's book (see yesterday) and The Arrival by Shaun Tan, who will also be a guest of the festival, there's ample room to make a case for the form at last having its moment in the Australian sunshine. That's Sunday 26 aug. If any of it is online I'll let you know. For my appearances on panels and interviews, scroll down and see my post of 8th aug.
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Nick Bertozzi has posted all ten pages of the Black Diamond pitch he and James Sturm prepared. My understanding is that they worked this up from the movie script (though they ignored its actual contents much more than I did) for the purpose of pitching to publishers. By the time First Second showed an interest in the book, they had committed to other jobs and could no longer see it through. This is dated 2003 and I was called in towards the end of 2004
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Taking comics seriously -- fun and all- Chicago Tribune- August 19.
Douglas Wolk is a nice enough bloke, but my feeling right now is that his book "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean" (Da Capo, 2007), which I haven't read, is probably doing more damage than good. I'm tired of having it all lumped together as though we are all doing the same thing. As my pal Evans once quipped; "Did Ingmar Bergman have to justify Star Wars every time he sat down for an interview?"
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YEEHOO!!! "The world's most unlikely detective comes to DVD for the first time ever in all 23 thrilling Season One episodes of The Rockford Files."
EVERYBODY OUT OF THE POOL!!

And everyone said 'how tall they've grown!'

A fter showing the photo of not-so-wee Cal yesterday I remembered that i had meant to compare it to these images from my 1993 story in The Dance of Lifey Death, which was my adaptation of The Jumblies by Edward Lear. I pictured my children as the jumblies , going to sea in a sieve, and then coming back twenty years later. hayley campbell is none too impressed with my clairvoyance, but Cal turned out just about right.


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MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL

The program is now up and I think you need to sort out tickets for these things. If you're going to be in town that week, go to the site and see what's doing.

Eddie Campbell & Nicki Greenberg
Date: 29 August 2007 Time: 12:45 - 1:30 Venue: Beckett Theatre Session for middle school, lower and upper secondary students: Grades 7 - 11 ---THINK VISUALLY. Eddie Campbell is the acclaimed artist behind From Hell, which was made into a major motion picture starring Johnny Depp. Comic artist Nicki Greenberg has turned The Great Gatsby into a graphic novel.

GET THE PICTURE?
Date: 30 August 2007 Time: 11:45am – 12:45pm Venue: Merlyn Theatre: Words and images work well together, but never completely without tension. Manipulators of word and image, picture book writer Shaun Tan, scriptwriter Keith Thompson and graphic novelist Eddie Campbell, discuss what can be said and what can only be shown.

SCHOOLS OF PAINTING
Date: 31 August 2007 Time: 1:30pm - 2:30pm Venue: Merlyn Theatre: A close likeness, of course, is what you’re looking for. But just as portraits can be impressionistic, expressionist or caricature, biographies can be executed in many ways while still being clearly of the subject. Victoria Glendinning, Brenda Niall and Eddie Campbell talk about elements of style in their art.
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update: Australian graphic novelist Shaun Tan, mentioned above, is interviewed in The Australian today:
THERE is something disconcertingly familiar about Shaun Tan's calm, open face as he looks up to greet the next autograph hunter in a queue snaking out the bookshop's door and around the corner. It's a mixed crowd here at a writers festival in homage to a book without words. Tan smiles and opens the book handed to him, stamps and signs it twice, and looks up again. Finally it dawns that, of course, it's Tan's face that appears on the protagonist of his graphic novel The Arrival. There it is in frame after frame of the more than 800 images in this sumptuous 120-page story tracing the journey of migration in a fantastic world.
(link thanks to Mick Evans)
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Steve Martin interviews Roz Chast, video (link via Journalista)