Greg Erskine

The pain is gone. The real bad pain I had five years ago, 2024, 2024. When 2024 rolled around I thought OK, this must be enough. Two years is enough, right? C’mon. Well you can put me out. Put me out. I fell asleep watching the movie I grabbed tonight. The Way of the Gun. I love Benicio del Toro. I woke up and thought: the pain is gone. Five years later, five and a half. Not really gone, but gone enough. The thrill too, but that’s the price you pay. I thought well it’s Friday night, nowhere to be tomorrow. I could make another cup of coffee. I could write.
– Chris Locke, 11/10/2007

I so want to steal all these cartoons and lay them in amongst the deathless prose you find here. Unfortunately, this is but a post and damned if I’m going to dig up this gregnog guy and get permission to display his work. Especially since he will probably say “No way, hoser.” (In some languages that last syllable. “-er,” is pronounced -”ay,” which takes away some of the sting of my inferred rejection. Instead then, let me just offer a few links to some of my favorites…)

This morning I read an optimistic screed from my favorite online auteur. Today’s entry at Cahier de Blog (aka The EGR Weblog) bespeaks a peculiar blend of optimism and realism, and if you have been following events as they unfold there for the last five or six years, reading what’s been posted today may give you a sense of relief, the kind of relief you might feel if one day at the seashore you saw a drowning man emerge and begin successfully to tread water. And while all you can see is the head of this formerly drowning man, and you might think he is simply treading water and has saved himself, if you peeked beneath the surface you might see that he’s not exactly treading water at all, but rather pedaling a bicycle, no hands, while slowly juggling red billiard balls, while doing some water-impeded slow-motion version of the macarena between juggles.

Water frames the action in a lot of Greg Erskine’s work. Here are a couple of my favorites…
Near Death Experience on Crum Creek (also known as “Adventure on the High Seas,” but I like my title better.)
Floaty Shoes

So after I read RB’s announcement that the continuing crisis seems to be over, naturally I went Googling for Louis Sass. And naturally the interesting stuff was hidden behind the firewalls of pay to play electronic publishers like PEP, Project Muse, and JSTOR. And while I have the ability to punch holes in those firewalls, access requires a tedious authentication sequence that doesn’t map to my intention of creating just another blog post, simple-minded, and not all that rigorously constructed. So fuck you PEP. Homey don’t play that game.

But in my Googling, I did run across H.D., and a reference to a paper my Freshman Writing teacher delivered in Bethlehem (and why does it always come back to Yeats?).

Which reminds me of a cartoon by Greg Erskine!
Joyce, Pound, Eliot

That one is a real knee slapper, I’m sure you will agree. This post I’m writing is more macramé than tightly woven tapestry, but the Pound character in the preceding cartoon reminded me of Chris’ most recent Mystic Bourgeoisie offering, wherein he links to The Trap. The Trap is an hour long BBC presentation that makes everything come clear. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the film “A Beautiful Mind.” But it has always been obvious to me that Bonnie wouldn’t rat out Clyde because they were in love, so the whole “Prisoner’s Dilemma” bullshit is just that, a contrivance advanced by a paranoid delusional schizophrenic and glommed onto by the likes of Robert McNamara in an effort to quantify and rationally parse human behavior and experience.

All of which reminds me of a couple of cartoons…
Emo Captain Yaar
and, The New Adventures of Jonathan Train