Gimlé

You ever have days where, no matter how hard you tried—how you felt—you felt dumb (well, in my case, dumber than usual)?

As if your frontal lobe had just gone numb and the rest of your cerebral cortex had wandered off somewhere and is watching the Simpsons on a tv in a shop display downtown.

Leaving you at home feeling stupid.

No? Must be me then.

What I do to try to jump-start my brain is read stuff.

Stuff like Colin’s Gulf War Diary.

It’s a sort of cartoon strip weblog. Mainly Colin trying to make sense of things around him, using the comic book strip as a tool.

Flooding with emotional logic, it’s likely to be shredded to bits by our more rational, logically minded weblogging pundits.

But to people who appreciate a story well told and enjoy reading somebody’s personal perspective on events that barely make sense to us anyway—

—To people who need an alternative to the two extremes of callous and rational punditry on one hand, and hyperbolic melodrama on the other, Colin provides excellent reading.

Baldur.
Clifton, Bristol.

For the next few weeks – until he abruptly disappeared from both L.A. radio and TV – Sahl would read the occasional line from my column on his program. One that he quoted came when I wrote a line that was, for about the first 50% of my life, the best-received thing I composed. It went, “Every political movement has an idiot element. If you can’t see the idiot element in your movement, you’re it.”

I was very proud of the line and, like all authors, I complimented myself on being the first person in the history of mankind to think of it. Then one day, I was reading a novel penned in 1933 and I found this line about playing poker: “When you sit down at the table, look around. And if you can’t spot the sucker, you’re him.” Apparently, it’s an old saying. Oh, well.
Mark Evanier—“Doonesbury”

I’ve been in bed, taking it easy, trying to get rid of the cold.

The best way to kill time when you can’t really do anything or concentrate on anything is, in my view, to browse the web.

It’s a medium that suits an ill person’s shortened attention span.

One of the things I’ve been reading, on my laptop, in bed, has been Mark Evanier’s website “POV online.”

A short introduction for those who do not know Mr. Evanier:

He is best known, in all likelyhood, as the Laurel to Sergio Aragonés’s Hardy in comic book series such as “Groo the Wanderer” and lately, the funny and kindly-hearted “Space Circus.”

He has also done a lot of work in TV and Animation writing as well as—and these are the works that have been entertaining me today as I lie wooly-headed with a cold—quite a few columns on comics, animation and tv.

In those columns he tells us stories about the people involved in the entertainment industries, telling us, in an anecdotal style that manages to be both understated and sincere, the things he’s heard of those people as well as his own experiences of meeting them.

It is easy to imagine these sort of columns turning into shallow, frothy nostalgia, but he deftly avoids that.

Even saying that he avoids it gives off the wrong impression. He means what he says and what he says is quite often spot on. He doesn’t have to avoid blubbering sentimental hindsight simply because the ground he’s treading on isn’t anywhere near that.

The tales he tells remind you that—while most of the works that came from the industry at that time certainly aren’t high art—some of them are the results of good honest hard work and in many ways possibly the finest piece of craftmanship the western culture has given the world.

It also reminded me that a good story is a good story. Some of the people Marc Evanier writes about are people I don’t know and do not interest me particularly…

…but Mr. Evanier pulls out a good story, an anecdote or two, gets our interest and manages to give us a glimpse of good people doing good work, the sort of honest breed which, it seems, is a rare species in today’s entertainment industry.

Nostalgic? Sure, a bit. But Mark Evanier tells stories about people—characters.

I’d like to see one good novel by the guy before I die.

I know he can do it.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.