Sunday 29 April 2007

Thoughts of an insomniac

J ust got up to throw the cat out, Fred Flintstone style. I look on the floor to see if my pal Breach is home yet. yup. Callum's in a sleeping bag too. They forgot to turn the computer off. I'll just type something before I do it.
Last night the wife and I deposited our daughter Erin at her final year school formal. The lass has grown up beautifully. But I don't know what's going on in the heads of the young 'uns I confess. Why not so long ago if you arrived here unannounced on a saturday night you might have caught me in my bathrobe, intended for bed, momentarily distracted into confiscating the lass's party drinks as she headed out the door with a box full of bacardi boozers, (or breezers or cruisers or whatever they're called).
How did it come to this, I asks ya? Eddie Campbell confiscating people's booze???
hayley campbell is home from London for two weeks and Breach has been up from Sydney staying for a few days. Being saturday night he thought it odd that one does not 'go out ' any more, and so he 'went out'. It's a good thing I wrote my book about all that when I was young and thought an interminable round of sleeping bags on other peoples floors a romantic thing. If I were to write that book now it would be much too satirical and mean, for the notion of waking up in a sleeping bag on a strange floor, with the nagging thought that I might like to vomit, fills me with unutterable horror.

*****
La Times on the series of Penguin paperback covers by Graphic novelists-april 29.
"Other jackets offer a denser and more verbal experience. Chris Ware's work for "Candide" is so typically elliptical that you can spend nearly as much time with it as with the novel. For a new and substantially expanded edition of "The Portable Dorothy Parker," the Canadian artist Seth created an illustrated table of contents, then used the inside back flap of the jacket for a funny and tender continuity life. Seth uses low-key art-deco colors, ruby-red and green, to hint at the classic Parker period of the Algonquin Round Table and the early days of the New Yorker. Bits of Parker's poetry are sprinkled throughout the design.
Most often the artists are selected by Penguin art director Paul Buckley, but occasionally authors chose for themselves. Thomas Pynchon said, grandly: "Sure, I'll put 'Gravity's Rainbow' in your series — but you have to get Frank Miller." Amazingly, they did."


things that happen while you weren't paying attention. (i think from three years ago, left on my desktop by breach)

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1 Comments:

Blogger Damien said...

for the notion of waking up in a sleeping bag on a strange floor, with the nagging thought that I might like to vomit, fills me with unutterable horror.

Floor-roulette-vomit-burnout. Tragic disease. But it does come with the side-effect of being a wonderful place from which to watch others do it.

29 April 2007 at 09:14:00 GMT-5  

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