Today’s Zippy, with Griffy and Zippy having another one of their Art Talks, with heavy similes:

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In the background, Oh Fudge Lucille’s Candies in Brants Beach NJ:

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Lucilles — note: no apostrophe — makes and sells fudge (among other things, like salt water taffy), but the name Oh Fudge alludes to the cutesy euphemism fudge for fuck.

In the 10/21 New Yorker, in “Goings On About Time”, a retrospective on the artist/illustrator Al Hirschfeld:

Al Hirschfeld … began his career in motion pictures, but soon turned to Broadway, and, over the next eight decades, became an icon with his trademark swooping-line drawings. An ardent playgoer (his namesake theatre currently houses “Kinky Boots”), Hirschfeld specialized in drawing show-biz folks. Though he’s often labelled a caricaturist, his work conveys respect as well as capturing the essence of a performer’s virtuosity. He drew (including for this magazine) until his death, in 2003, six months before his hundredth birthday. This week, “The Line King’s Library,” a rich and glamorous history of twentieth-century theatre, opens at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

A self-portrait (in a barber chair):

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From Wikipedia:

Albert “Al” Hirschfeld (June 21, 1903 – January 20, 2003) was an American caricaturist best known for his black and white portraits of celebrities and Broadway stars.

… In 1943, Hirschfeld married one of Europe’s most famous actresses, the late Dolly Haas. They were married for more than 50 years, and in addition, they produced a daughter, Nina.

Hirschfeld is known for hiding Nina’s name in most of the drawings he produced after her birth. The name would appear in a sleeve, in a hairdo, or somewhere in the background. As Margo Feiden described it, Hirschfeld engaged in the “harmless insanity,” as he called it, of hiding her name [Nina] at least once in each of his drawings. The number of NINAs concealed is shown by an Arabic numeral to the right of his signature. Generally, if no number is to be found, either NINA appears once or the drawing was executed before she was born. (Almost all of Hirschfeld’s limited edition lithographs have NINAs concealed in them. However, the pursuit is made that much harder because there is no numeral to the right of the signature to guide you.)

It’s almost impossible to pick a few Hirschfeld drawings from the extraordinary number available. Here are two group depictions, the first one (of the Algonquin Round Table) famous:

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(At the table, clockwise from left: Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Franklin P. Adams, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, Robert Sherwood. In back from left to right: Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield and Frank Case.)

And from the New Yorker of 9/14/52, the cast of Mr. Pickwick:

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(Nigel Green, Estelle Winwood, Clive Revill, George Howe, Nydia Westman and Sarah Marshall).

Hirschfeld on Hirschfeld, for a Society of Illustrators, Museum of American Illustration, exhibition in April-June 2002:

“I am not at all sure as to whether or not my drawings are even ‘caricatures,’ wrote Al Hirschfeld a half century after he first started drawing. “I would feel more comfortable being classified as a ‘characterist,’ if there were such a word or school. All I know for certain is the ‘capturing of a likeness’ is of secondary importance to me. My primary interest is in producing a drawing capable of surviving the obvious fun of recognition or news value. The capturing of a likeness is of no more importance to me than the humming of a tune! The subject matter of ‘likeness’ serves merely as stimulant or catalyst — a sort of springboard for an unpredictable dive into the unknown. Fortunately, I have never been at a loss for subject matter.”

(About art rather than language.)

Noted in several places, an exhibition of collages by poet Mark Strand. From the New Yorker of 9/24, ”Mark Strand’s Playful Collages” by Rachel Arons:

Before Mark Strand became one of the great contemporary American poets, he trained as a painter. At Yale in the nineteen-fifties, he studied under the color theorist Josef Albers, and throughout his life he has continued making paintings, prints, and collages. In recent years, Strand, a former Poet Laureate of the United States and professor of literature, most recently at Columbia, has moved away from writing altogether to focus on art. A collection of his collages, made in Madrid and New York, is currently on display at the Lori Bookstein gallery, in Chelsea.

Two exemplars:

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Arons interviews Strand:

The collage pieces currently on display at Lori Bookstein are made not from found materials but from paper you made and colored yourself, at the Dieu Donné artists’ space here in New York. Can you explain a little about the paper-making process—what draws you to it and how you incorporate it into your collages?

Well, making paper is fun. Mixing pigment with pulp and adding the blend to the pulp that will eventually become a sheet of paper is wonderfully absorbing. With something called “formation aid” I use my hands to create the various swirls, swoops, drops, and dribbles that bind with the basic sheet of pulp. That basic sheet can be thick or thin, opaque or transparent, black or white or any color I wish. This is the first stage in the making of my collages. I make papers that I believe I can use or that I envision using.

And in the 10/10/13  New York Review of Books, “The Collages of Mark Strand” by Francine Prose:

Just when we think that we have seen enough works on paper to have some sense of the possibilities and the limits of what paper can do, the poet Mark Strand’s beautiful collages—made in Madrid, where he lives—make us realize how profoundly we’ve underestimated the remarkable feats of magic that can be performed by some wood pulp, or rags, water, a few chemicals—and the hand and eye of an artist.

Made from pieces of handmade paper, sometimes painted, Strand’s work is very different from that of Picasso, Matisse, and Kurt Schwitters, whose papiers collés, cut-outs, and collages often seem intended to make us aware of the origins and previous functions of their component parts, cut from sheets of wallpaper, colored paper, and newsprint, or, in the case of Schwitters, sometimes assembled from detritus found in the street. Who would have dreamed that torn scraps could speak to one another, exchanging playful, private jokes? Who could have predicted that fragments of paper could appear to glide and migrate across the page, to attract and repel one another, even when we know (or think we know) that they are firmly fixed in place? Who knew that abstract paper shapes would have so much to tell us about the fortuitous cooperation of chance, accident, intention, and aesthetics, about the complex partnership between the artist and the paper itself? Who would have imagined that a colored sliver of paper could deepen and enrich the color of its neighbors, or how surprised a color could seem to find itself beside a very different hue, or how obligingly these colors could change in response to their environment, like a newly identified species of ragged, two-dimensional chameleons?

Pretty much as far away from my collages as could be. But very satisfying to look at.

From several sources, pointers to this piece of in-your-face public art:

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The story from the NYT on the 22nd: “Angry at Prague, Artist Ensures He’s Understood”, by Dan Bilefsky:

“The finger,” said the Czech sculptor David Cerny [in Czech spelling Černý] “speaks for itself.” On that point, at least, everyone could agree.

Mr. Cerny is not known for understatement or diplomacy, from depicting Germany as a network of motorways resembling a swastika to displaying a caricature of a former Czech president inside an enormous fiberglass rear end.

But on Monday, Mr. Cerny, 45, took his political satire to new heights — or depths, depending on your perspective — when, on the eve of Czech general elections this weekend, he installed on the Vltava River a 30-foot-high plastic purple hand with a raised middle finger. It is a symbol, he said, that points directly at the Prague Castle, the seat of the current Czech president, Milos Zeman

Mr. Cerny said the monumental hand with its 16-foot-long outstretched middle finger, placed on a float facing the castle, was a “scream of alarm” against the state of politics in the Czech Republic, endemic corruption and Mr. Zeman, a former leftist prime minister, whom he accused of becoming intoxicated with power.

He said the sculpture, which he gave an unprintable title, was also aimed at the country’s Communist Party, which could gain a share of power in the coming elections for the first time since the revolution that overthrew communism more than two decades ago.

The statue is generally referred to as “Middle Finger”, though presumably the Czech name is something stronger, like ‘Up Yours” or ‘Fuck You’.

On the finger, from Wikipedia:

In Western culture, the finger (as in giving someone the finger or the bird), also known as the finger wave, the middle finger, flipping someone off, flipping the bird, shooting the bird, the rude finger or the one finger salute, is an obscene hand gesture, which is often a sign of extreme or moderate contempt, roughly equivalent in meaning to “fuck off”, “fuck you”, “shove it up your ass”, or “go fuck yourself.” It is performed by showing the back of a closed fist that has only the middle finger extended upwards, though in some locales the thumb is also extended. Extending the finger is considered a universal symbol of contempt in several cultures, especially Western cultures. Many cultures do use similar gestures to display their disrespect, though others use it to express pointing with no intentional disrespect toward other cultures.

There’s a rich literature on the finger. One of its byways is the appearance of the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate on the Laugh-In tv show:

Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (often simply referred to as Laugh-In) is an American sketch comedy television program that ran for 140 episodes from January 22, 1968, to March 12, 1973, on the NBC television network. It was hosted by comedians Dan Rowan and Dick Martin and featured, at various times, Chelsea Brown, Johnny Brown, Ruth Buzzi, Judy Carne, Richard Dawson, Henry Gibson, Teresa Graves, Goldie Hawn, Arte Johnson, Larry Hovis, Jeremy Lloyd, Dave Madden, Pigmeat Markham, Gary Owens, Pamela Rodgers, Barbara Sharma, Alan Sues, Lily Tomlin and Jo Anne Worley.

… The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate Award, saluting actual dubious achievements by the government or famous people, such as the announcement of a new Veterans Administration hospital to be erected in Southern California shortly after another such facility was destroyed in the Sylmar earthquake of 1971. The trophy was a gilt, outstretched finger atop a square base. “The flying, fickle finger of fate” was already a familiar catchphrase on the show (Dan Rowan would use the phrase when ushering “new talent” like Tiny Tim on stage).

As I noted in a posting on Zippy the Pinhead, cartoonist Bill Griffith has an attraction to

tabooed F words, especially the Big F, fuck. The American tv comedy show Laugh-In flirted with the F Word on a regular basis, notably in Rowan and Martin’s granting of Flying Fickle Finger of Fate awards, “saluting actual dubious achievements by the government or famous people” (from the Wikipedia page), and in appearances by the Farkel Family, a large clan who were introduced, one by one, by name, on every appearance: Sparkle Farkel, Flicker Farkle, the twins Simon and Gar Farkel, Charcoal Farkel (a black child, identical twin to the white Sparkle Farkel), Mark Farkel, Fritz and Fred Farkel. The sketches presented occasions for cast-challenging tongue twisters like “That’s a fine-looking Farkel flinger you found there, Frank”.

Two other Černý sculptures:

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An often playful, and rarely subtle, artist.

[Addendum: an earlier posting on the finger, "Annals of obscene gestures" of 2/5/13.]

In an AZBlogX posting this morning, there’s an image (#3) evoking Hercules / Heracles / Herakles together with Antaeus / Antaios — a grinning man hoisting his lover over his shoulder (something my man Jacques did with me when we were young, vigorous, and playful). In an earlier AZBlogX posting, there was

a version of Hercules lofting Antaeus, brought firmly into the modern gay world by tattoos, an earring, Antaeus’s muscular butt and thighs, and Antaeus’s hand stroking Hercules’s hard cock

The legend lives on, now with an explicitly homoerotic context. And with an echo of Jacob wrestling the angel (posting here).

From Wikipedia:

Antaeus (also Antaios) … in Greek and Berber mythology was a half-giant, the son of Poseidon and Gaia, whose wife was goddess Tinge.

… He would challenge all passers-by to wrestling matches, kill them, and collect their skulls, so that he might one day build out of them a temple to his father Poseidon. He was indefatigably strong as long as he remained in contact with the ground (his mother earth), but once lifted into the air he became as weak as other men.

Antaeus had defeated most of his opponents until it came to his fight with Heracles (who was on his way to the Garden of Hesperides for his 11th Labour). Upon finding that he could not beat Antaeus by throwing him to the ground as he would reheal due to his parentage (Gaia), Heracles discovered the secret of his power. Holding Antaeus aloft, Heracles crushed him in a bearhug. … The struggle between Antaeus and Heracles is a favorite subject in ancient and Renaissance sculpture.

From an ancient Greek (5th century BCE) krater, on a Greek stamp:

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Then on to the 16th century, Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1530:

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and Hans Baldung in 1531:

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Today’s Zippy, back on the diner track:

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The text of the strip veers Zippy-fashion through politics, art (Andrew Wyeth), and pop food (Mallomars), to culminate in an outrageous pun on “I never met a man I didn’t like” (attributed to Will Rogers).

Start with the diner:

The Deluxe Town Diner is an historic diner at 627 Mount Auburn Street in Watertown, Massachusetts.

This diner was manufactured on site, rather than having been prefabricated and shipped to the site from a specific diner manufacturer. In 1947, George Knotos and his father built this diner around their earlier Worcester Lunch Car Company diner. The Worcester diner became the kitchen in the current building. The Town Diner’s two-tone porcelain siding and its round glass-block corners combine architectural features of the Wocester and Paramount Diner manufacturers, respectively.

The diner was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 as “Town Diner”. (Wikipedia link)

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Background:

Wyeth:

Andrew Newell Wyeth (… July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century.

In his art, Wyeth’s favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine. One of the best-known images in 20th-century American art is his painting, Christina’s World, currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. (Wikipedia link)

Mallomars:

Chocolate-coated marshmallow treats are produced in different variations around the world, with several countries claiming to have invented it or hailing it as their “national confection”. The first chocolate-coated marshmallow treat was created in the early 1800s in Denmark.

… In the United States, Mallomars are produced by Nabisco. A graham cracker circle is covered with a puff of extruded marshmallow, then enrobed in dark chocolate, which forms a hard shell. Mallomars were introduced to the public in 1913, the same year as the Moon Pie (a confection which has similar ingredients). The first box of Mallomars was sold in West Hoboken, New Jersey (now Union City, New Jersey).

Mallomars are generally available from early October through to April. They are not distributed during the summer months, supposedly because they melt easily in summer temperatures, though this is as much for marketing reasons as for practical ones. Devoted eaters of the cookie have been known to stock up during winter months and keep them refrigerated over the summer, although Nabisco markets other fudge-coated cookie brands year-round. Eighty-five percent of all Mallomars are sold in the New York metropolitan area. They are produced entirely within Canada, at a factory in Scarborough, Ontario. The issue of Nabisco’s choice to release Mallomars seasonally became a parodied topic on a sketch delivered by graphic artist Pierre Bernard on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. (Wikipedia link)

From Leith Chu today, this “rare example of what architectural historians refer to as a “fertility window” “:

The design elements are routine, but sometimes the combination makes for high phallicity.

From Emily Rizzo and Arne Adolfsen on Facebook, a link to this site for Ed Wheeler:

Ed Wheeler, a photographer, superimposes himself on famous paintings while dressed in a Santa costume.These hysterical renditions are inspired by Ed’s long time traditions of dressing as Santa for holiday cards he created for fun. For years, Wheeler would send out photographs of himself as Santa doing strange and comical things to clients around the holiday.

… As you can see in these photos, Santa (Wheeler) has made appearances in many famous paintings. He appeared in his long underwear as Venus de Milo in Botticelli’s most iconic painting, and has also posed as a pensive, and a very spirited Santa, over Claude Monet’s Water Lillies. Through Wheeler, Santa has ridden Napoleon’s horse, sipped a cup of coffee in a 1940s diner, played poker with dogs, and floated in a flock of businessmen into the stratosphere in these humorous interpretations of some of art’s most iconic works.

This is a parody of Edward Hopper’s famous Nighthawks. Other parodies viewable here.

More on “Is it art?” But this time it’s not art vs.porn, but art vs. craft. From the NYT Magazine‘s annual “The Lives They Lived”issue, a piece on sculptor Ruth Asawa: “The subversively “domestic” artist”, by Robert Sullivan:

Less than five years after graduating from Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, Ruth Asawa’s industrial-wire sculptures were getting notice in the national press, though invariably her pieces were dismissed as women’s craft work, as opposed to art. “These are ‘domestic’ sculptures in a feminine, handiwork mode,” ArtNews said in 1956. Such critiques masked her relentless subversiveness. After dark, on March 18, 1968, she installed her first public sculpture, in Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco: two mermaids in a fountain, one nursing a merbaby.

… The landscape architect in charge of the square’s renovation, Lawrence Halprin, described the sculpture as a suburban lawn ornament and sought to replace it with a modernist abstraction — a 15-foot shaft. San Franciscans, especially women, successfully rallied behind Asawa.

One of Asawa’s pieces:

From a number of Facebook friends, the food miniatures of Pierre Javelle and Akiko Ida, from the 1/11/12 NPR piece “Go Where Raisins Swell Into Grapes, And Lemons Light The Sky” by Robert Krulwich. Parisian food photographers Javelle and Ida create miniatures involving food, like this droll depiction of raisins being blown up into grapes:

Miniatures have come by here twice before:

in “Naughty Little People” on 8/11/13 (an assortment of artists, sexually oriented);

and in “Cupcake sledding” on 9/13/13 (Christopher Boffoli, on food themes).

My cousin Eleanor Houck points me to artwork by her son Rich (so, my first cousin once removed), who has a studio in downtown Reading PA.; website here. Interesting work in several media, including some pieces of local interest (nostalgic for me), like this painting of the Penn St. Bridge (over the Schuylkill River):

Going east over the bridge, into Reading. The tall building is the Courthouse, and that’s Mount Penn in the background.

Earlier posting with a dowtown view from 1941, here.

Not about language.

From among hundreds of designs for the Year of the Horse, this is the one I chose to send to friends today:

A final cartoon for the day, a Bizarro:

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On Dali, very briefly, from Wikipedia:

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), known as Salvador Dalí … was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres, Spain.

… His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931.

The painting:

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Melting watches.

Zippy is routinely surreal, but today’s alludes more directly to surrealistic art than most of the strips:

This has the feel of a Magritte (and includes a recurrent Zippy theme, bowling and bowling balls). Plus, you get the pun in the title, “Saxual identity”.

On Surrealism on this blog, see the posting of 3/22/13. Magritte has come up a number of times, notably on 7/19/12, 7/21/13, and 9/27/13.

(Almost all about art and sexuality.)

From Amanda Walker, a pointer to this Gawker posting about some forthcoming Finnish stamps: “Finland’s New Stamps are Drawings of Gay Bondage Porn” by Jordan Sargeant on April 15th. Two illustrations:

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Neither image shows genital nudity, but both are intensely homoerotic, and it’s hard to imagine either one on a U.S. stamp. It’s not clear that either image is actually of gay bondage. #1 simply shows homoerotic imagery; #2 shows dominance and submission, and strongly suggests sadomasochism,  but not (here) bondage. (Other ToF drawings do show bondage, some show male-male affection, and a fair number are humorous.)

On Touko Laaksonen (“Tom of Finland”) on this blog, see here.

(I’ve posted stronger stuff onToF on AZBlogX, but I despair of finding the links; the program LjSEEK rarely finds anything I search for. But here are two postings I’ve found:

8/6/10: The Tom of Finland action figure comes home (link)

4/19/11: Tom of Finland collages: (link) )

The stamps will go on into circulation in August of this year.

Three cartoons for today: a Dilbert, a Bizarro, and a Mother Goose and Grimm:

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#1 shows the pointy-headed boss failing to respect the Gricean maxim of Quantity, by saying considerably less than what’s required in the context (“We need it for various things, and so on”); the suggestion is that the boss simply has no idea what’s required in the context, or is unable to supply a clear and informative answer,

#2 shows a combination of two prominent images from popular culture, both very frequently parodied: the couple from Grant Wood’s American Gothic, and Batman, with a pun on Gothic / Gotham, Gotham City being the locale of Batman.

Finally, in #3, another pun (mildly off-color) on plucked ‘with feathers removed’ vs. metaphorical fucked ‘ruined’.

I heard it on NPR’s Morning Edition, who got it from the BBC, in this story: “Shakespeare a ‘cultural icon’ abroad”:

William Shakespeare is the UK’s greatest cultural icon, according to the results of an international survey released to mark the 450th anniversary of his birth [traditionally celebrated on April 23rd].

Five thousand young adults [note that: young adults are the arbiters of popular taste] in India, Brazil, Germany, China and the USA were asked to name a person they associated with contemporary UK arts and culture.

Shakespeare was the most popular response, with an overall score of 14%.

The result emerged from a wider piece of research for the British Council.

The Queen and [footballer] David Beckham came second and third respectively. Other popular responses included JK Rowling, Adele, The Beatles, Paul McCartney and Elton John.

Shakespeare, the Queen, and David Beckham: the Big Three. You wonder how the people surveyed understood the question.

Celebrity is an odd thing.

Fred Shapiro on ADS-L yesterday:

Since I am now working on the second edition of the Yale Book of Quotations, let me ask, were there any particularly memorable catchphrases or one-off quotations from the Krazy Kat strip?

John Baker replies:

Well, Krazy Kat referred to Ignatz Mouse as “Li’l Dollink,” and the strip’s captions referred to Joe Stork as “purveyor of progeny to prince & proletarian.”  I don’t know if either of those really qualify as particularly memorable.

KK’s Dollink (for Darling): it’ sounds like Yiddish-English, but it begins to look like KK’s dialect is sui generis.

Wikipedia on the comic:

Krazy Kat is an American newspaper comic strip by cartoonist George Herriman (1880–1944), which ran from 1913 to 1944. It first appeared in the New York Evening Journal, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, was a major booster for the strip throughout its run. The characters had been introduced previously in a side strip with Herriman’s earlier creation, The Dingbat Family. The phrase “Krazy Kat” originated there, said by the mouse by way of describing the cat. Set in a dreamlike portrayal of Herriman’s vacation home of Coconino County, Arizona, Krazy Kat’s mixture of offbeat surrealism, innocent playfulness and poetic, idiosyncratic language has made it a favorite of comics aficionados and art critics for more than 80 years.

The strip focuses on the curious love triangle between its title character, a guileless, carefree, simple-minded cat of indeterminate gender (referred to as both “he” and “she”); the obsessive antagonist Ignatz Mouse; and the protective police dog, Offissa Bull Pupp. Krazy nurses an unrequited love for the mouse. However, Ignatz despises Krazy and constantly schemes to throw bricks at Krazy’s head, which Krazy interprets as a sign of affection, uttering grateful replies such as “Li’l dollink, allus f’etful”. Offissa Pupp, as Coconino County’s administrator of law and order, makes it his unwavering mission to interfere with Ignatz’s brick-tossing plans and lock the mouse in the county jail.

Despite the slapstick simplicity of the general premise, the detailed characterization, combined with Herriman’s visual and verbal creativity, made Krazy Kat one of the first comics to be widely praised by intellectuals and treated as “serious” art.

Like many other classic comic strips, most Krazy Kats are very busy multiple-panel productions, which makes it hard to find examples that can be successfully posted (within reasonable space limits) on this blog. Hard, but not impossible. Here’s the one from January 6th, 1918 that’s reproducible — and definitely about language:

Note the raising of /æ/ to /ɛ/, and not just before nasals. Plus the vaguely Italian-English udda for other. I looked to the Wikipedia article on George Herriman for a clue about where the dialect features come from:

George Joseph Herriman (August 22, 1880 – April 25, 1944) was an American cartoonist best known for the comic strip Krazy Kat (1913–1944). More influential than popular, Krazy Kat had an appreciative audience among people in the arts.

… Herriman’s work has been a primary influence on cartoonists such as Will Eisner, Charles M. Schulz, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Bill Watterson, and Chris Ware.

Herriman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to mulatto Creole parents, and grew up in Los Angeles.

… The strip was noted for its poetic, dialect-heavy dialogue; its fantastic, shifting backgrounds; and its bold, experimental page layouts. In the strip’s main motif, Ignatz Mouse would pelt Krazy with bricks, which the naïve, androgynous Kat would interpret as symbols of love. As the strip progressed, a love triangle developed between Krazy, Ignatz and Offisa Pupp.

Tentatively, I suggest that Herriman playfully pasted together features from several sources to create KK’s dialect.

For my grand-daughter’s 10th birthday, I gave her a couple of presents, including the Carl Barks book of comics for Disney, Donald Duck: Trail of the Unicorn (2014). Pre-ordered, arriving well after the birthday, which was unfortunate, but at least guaranteed that she hadn’t already read it (she reads an enormous amount).

This volume is in The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library, a set of hardback volumes from Fantagraphics (in Seattle) — beautiful reproductions of the comics (each volume featuring either Uncle Scrooge or Donald Duck) printed in sets on good paper with high-quality color. I have three: the one above, plus the first to be printed, Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes (2011), and also Uncle $crooge: Only a Poor Old Man (2012).

Barks was a story-teller, not (especially) a joke-teller. Here’s George Lucas in his introduction to Only a Poor Old Man:

My greatest source of enjoyment in Carl Barks’s comics is the imagination of his stories. They’re so full of crazy ideas – unique and special and bizarre – not in the contemporary sense of bizarre but in the sense that, to a chilf duringh the ’50s, they were extremely exotic.

The stories are also very cinematic. They have a clear beginning, middle, and end, and operate in scenes, unlike many comic strips and books. Barks’s stories just move from panel to panel, but flow in sequences – sometimes several pages long – that lead to new sequences.

On the Scrooge books, this posting of mine quotes from Wikipedia:

Uncle Scrooge (stylized as Uncle $crooge) was a comic book starring the stingy Scrooge McDuck (“the richest duck in the world”), his nephew Donald Duck, and grandnephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and revolving around their adventures in Duckburg and around the world. It was first published in Four Color Comics #386 March 1952, and the most recent issue to date (Uncle $crooge #404) was released in 2011.

… The first 70 issues mostly consisted of stories written and drawn by Carl Barks.

And on Barks himself:

Carl Barks (March 27, 1901 – August 25, 2000) was an American cartoonist, best known for his comics about Donald Duck and as the creator of Scrooge McDuck. He worked anonymously until late in his career; fans dubbed him The Duck Man and The Good Duck Artist. In 1987, Barks was one of the three inaugural inductees of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.

Barks worked for the Disney Studio and Western Publishing where he created Duckburg and many of its inhabitants, such as Scrooge McDuck (1947), Gladstone Gander (1948), the Beagle Boys (1951), The Junior Woodchucks (1951), Gyro Gearloose (1952), Cornelius Coot (1952), Flintheart Glomgold (1956), John D. Rockerduck (1961) and Magica De Spell (1961). Cartoonist Will Eisner called him “the Hans Christian Andersen of comic books.” (Wikipedia link)

There’s not a lot of specifically linguistic interest in these stories, delightful though they are. Here’s a four-panel sequence from Lost in the Andes that glances on language matters, via questions of identity:

Frank Bruni in an op-ed piece in the NYT on April 8th, “The Water Cooler Runs Dry”, which began:

If you’re closing in on 50 but want to feel much, much older, teach a college course. I’m doing that now, at 49, and hardly a class goes by when I don’t make an allusion that prompts my students to stare at me as if I just dropped in from the Paleozoic era.

Last week I mentioned the movie “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” Only one of the 16 students had heard of it. I summarized its significance, riffling through the Depression, with which they were familiar, and Jane Fonda’s career, with which they weren’t. “Barbarella” went sailing over their heads. I didn’t dare test my luck with talk of leg warmers and Ted Turner.

I once brought up Vanessa Redgrave. Blank stares. Greta Garbo. Ditto. We were a few minutes into a discussion of an essay that repeatedly invoked Proust’s madeleine when I realized that almost none of the students understood what the madeleine signified or, for that matter, who this Proust fellow was.

And these are young women and men bright and diligent enough to have gained admission to Princeton University, which is where our disconnect is playing out.

The bulk of that disconnect, obviously, is generational. Seemingly all of my students know who Gwyneth Paltrow is. And with another decade or two of reading and living and being subjected to fossils like me, they’ll assemble a richer inventory of knowledge and trivia, not all of it present-day.

Surely that’s a contribution. But Bruni goes on the refer to what some commenters have labeled “the Balkanization of experience” or “the age of fracture”:

But the pronounced narrowness of the cultural terrain that they and I share — the precise limits of the overlap — suggests something additional at work. In a wired world with hundreds of television channels, countless byways in cyberspace and all sorts of technological advances that permit each of us to customize his or her diet of entertainment and information, are common points of reference dwindling? Has the personal niche supplanted the public square?

Both literally and figuratively, the so-called water-cooler show is fading fast, a reality underscored by a fact that I stumbled across in last week’s edition of The New Yorker: In the mid-1970s, when the sitcom “All in the Family” was America’s top-rated television series, more than 50 million people would tune in to a given episode. That was in a country of about 215 million.

I checked on the No. 1 series for the 2012-13 television season. It was “NCIS,” an episode of which typically drew fewer than 22 million people, even counting those who watched a recording of it within a week of its broadcast. That’s out of nearly 318 million Americans now.

That is, even people of the same generation seem to share much less than they used to, because they get (in fact, select) different inputs.

What experiences and knowledge people share is a complex subject. Some 35+ years ago, Ann Daingerfield Zwicky was teaching a freshman composition course at Ohio State and ran into an experience much like Bruni’s. She made some cultural allusion and was met by blank stares. Intrigued, she went on to poll the class.

She started with children’s literature, asking about very popular works like Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland. For each item, several students said they didn’t even recognize the titles. Knowing that almost all schools have students read one or more Shakespeare plays in high school, she was hoping that, say, Macbeth and Julius Caesar would be virtually universal. But no; English teachers each made their own selections, and their students knew only those (they didn’t read or watch things that weren’t assigned) and didn’t recognize allusions to others (surprisingly, even Romeo and Juliet).

Then she tried some popular-cultural items, and was astonished to find no uniform experience with popular tv shows, sports teams, and so on. A lot of shared experience, but with serious islands of its lack.

I wish there were some way to compare her experience with the current situation that Bruni describes. I’m as convinced as Bruni is that things that gotten worse, as evidenced by the stats he cites, and for good reason.