Emdashes. Modern Times Between the Lines.

Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
A Web Comic: The Wavy Rule
Before it moved to The New Yorker:
Ask the Librarians archive

About Emdashes | Email us

 
April252012

Alison Bechdel: Cathexis, Fontographer, and the Proper "It's"

Filed under: Seal Barks   Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,

Maud Newton puts the noble in Barnes & Noble in this terrific interview with Alison Bechdel. Here’s an intriguing pair of passages about Bechdel’s use of a digital font (made with Fontographer, as I recall from a recent event with Bechdel at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) instead of hand-lettering for her graphic novels:
BNR: …Apart from all your second-guessing of your writing itself, I’ve noticed that you’re really hard on yourself for using a font based on your handwriting to letter your frames.

AB: I do feel guilty about it, like it’s somehow cheating to use a digital font, and to not actually hand-letter my work. But at the same time, I have these lengthy passages of quotations from [Donald] Winnicott or from Virginia Woolf that I have obsessively hand-lettered.

BNR: So interesting: the parts that aren’t your language.

AB: Yeah. In fact those things are treated as drawings in the book, even though they’re text. I frame them as a drawing and often overlay them with my digital narration. It’s almost like I’m giving those words more attention than my own words, but not really.
(continued)

0 comments
April242012

Who First Said "Print Is Dead," Dr. Venkman?

Filed under: Looked Into   Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

A rewatch of the original Ghostbusters prompted an urgent Google search, with these satisfying Metafilter results. The asker’s question (also my question):
Print is dead? I was watching Ghostbusters (1984) this weekend, and at one point the character Egon Spengler is asked a question, to which he responds: ‘Print is dead.” What is the earliest recorded use of this phrase?
Among the satisfying replies:
I found a reference in the Antioch Review (1967) that uses “print is dead” as the characterization for Marshall McLuhan’s scholarship, which make a lot of sense to me in this context. This previously is also pertinent.
And:
Someone else in that group also mentions that the “print is dead” line actually gained some popularity in the early 80s in tech circles as the personal computer gained prominence. It likely wasn’t the earliest recorded use, but Egon’s quote may have just been a result of the growing sentiment of the time.
Meanwhile, a recent post on Movies.com answers the question I somehow didn’t think to ask, which is what the various Ghostbusters would look like if they were cartoon ghosts. Now you know.


Best of all, I learned from the Metafilter thread above that Harold Ramis went to the high school three blocks from my new home in Chicago! This must be why I keep watching his movies. Anita O’Day went there, too, which gives me shivers. So did Shecky Greene and Sidney Sheldon, but not all at the same time.

Related: The Contested Number of Years That Bill Murray Is Stuck in “Groundhog Day” (continued)

0 comments
March122012

Won't You Help Us Wish Happy Birthday to the Interrobang‽

Filed under: Little Words   Tagged: , , ,

‽
It’s turning fifty this month. It’s much younger than the interroverti, which gives the tender interrobang a materteral pat on the points. By the way, the HTML is & #8253 ; (without the spaces).

—Emily Gordon (continued)

0 comments
February032012

The Contested Number of Years That Bill Murray Is Stuck in Groundhog Day

Filed under: Looked Into   Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Harold Ramis says ten. (The screenwriter, Danny Rubin, invites you to pony up to find out what he thinks.) These folks say eight years, eight months, and sixteen days. My favorite estimate comes from this brilliant breakdown, which gives it as 12,403 days of Sonny and Cher and sweet vermouth on the rocks with a twist, or almost 34 years. Poor Phil. He really earned that happy ending.

—Emily Gordon (continued)

0 comments
January082012

Happy New Year, and Happy Eight Years of Emdashes

Filed under: Headline Shooter   Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We haven’t been posting much, you say? We know it. We’ve all been busy doing other things, including Martin Schneider’s stylish new project, Box Office Boffo. In his words, he’s “blogging every #1 movie in America from 1970 to the present day.” Even better: “Every week there’s a #1 movie at the box office, and I’m going to watch them all.” Not only do you get close inspections of movies like The Owl and the Pussycat and Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and whole years in review, you get the original posters, which will make you nostalgic in all kinds of ways.

Meanwhile, Pollux, our favorite painter/cartoonist/New Yorker cover critic/Renaissance man, just had a show at Artlife South Bay. Jonathan Taylor went back to grad school, proving once again that he’s both a gentleman and a scholar, and I’ve been working on a relaunch of The Washington Spectator’s website and writing theater reviews for Time Out Chicago.

So our collective focus has been elsewhere. But speaking for myself, I’m feeling emdashy again. There’s work to be done and punctuation marks to be shepherded, shorn, and protected from the elements.

—Emily Gordon (continued)

0 comments
November222011

Guest Review: Alan Rickman's Trenchant "Seminar"

Filed under: The Catbird Seat: Friends & Guests   Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

96241_Seminar_Image505x250_FINAL[1] (1).jpg

Lee Alexander writes:

It’s hard not to think of Alan Rickman as Severus Snape, curl-lipped and leering behind a smoking cauldron as Harry Potter’s ambiguously evil Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor. In Thersea Rebeck’s new comedy, Seminar (which opened on Sunday at the Golden Theatre), Rickman is once again in command of the classroom, abandoning his robe and wand for a somewhat more mundane task: instructing four twentysomethings on the craft of writing a novel.

Though Rickman’s character, the famous writer Leonard, snidely remark that “the novel has fallen on hard times,” the audience is secure in the knowledge that the play has not. During the show—which gives us a sense of what highbrow reality television would be like if it existed—we watch with delight as the four hopefuls are eviscerated, one by one, under the cutting critiques of their fiercely disparaging instructor.

Seminar isn’t just a play about writing; it’s also a play about power. Director Sam Gold (continued)

0 comments
October262011

Synonym Buns: Happy 50th, Phantom Tollbooth

Filed under: Little Words   Tagged: , , , , , , ,

At Flavorpill, vintage covers of The Phantom Tollbooth from all over the world. The 2006 German edition is particularly gorgeous, as is the ethereal 2007 Chinese cover. But who in their right mind would junk Jules Feiffer’s illustrations?

—Emily Gordon (continued)

0 comments
October252011

The Great Kate Beaton on Drawing for The New Yorker

Filed under: Seal Barks   Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

From a recent A.V. Club interview about Kate Beaton’s essential new book, Hark! A Vagrant. The as-close-to-universally-beloved-as-it’s-possible-to-get-without-being-a-baby-panda Beaton and cartoonist Sam Means had a cartoon in the June 28 issue of the magazine (as “Beans,” which is a great combi-name). Are more forthcoming? Only Bob Mankoff knows for sure.
AVC: How did you get involved with The New Yorker? Did they come to you, or did you go to them?

KB: No, you have to submit to them. You give them packages. The New Yorker doesn’t come to anybody, not even the people who’ve been published there for 20 years. You have to submit, and you just keep doing it until they buy one.

AVC: What’s it like doing comics for them?

KB: It’s just a different audience—and by “audience,” I mean the New Yorker editor who buys your comic or doesn’t, and he’s the guy you want to really impress. I could do anything I wanted on my site, but I just wanted to get in somewhere where an editor said, “This is good enough,” or, “This is not good enough.” There’s a certain New Yorker sensibility, style, sense of humor, that I thought about when I was making them, like, “I want this to look like a New Yorker cartoon.” And I thought that’s how I should go about it. I didn’t write them, Sam Means wrote them, and I drew them. We had a partnership. But recently, I was on a panel with Roz Chast. She’s amazing, and she was like, “You shouldn’t adhere to any style, you should just do what you wanna do. You shouldn’t make it look like a New Yorker cartoon, you should make it look like yours.” Which I never really considered. [Laughs.] I mean, The New Yorker’s kind of an institution. But she probably is right. I enjoyed doing it, but maybe I would enjoy it more if I had stuck to my own sensibilities more. I don’t know.

See, we do sometimes still write about The New Yorker.


—Emily Gordon (continued)

4 comments
July082011

92Y Audience Can't Curb Its Enthusiasm

Filed under: On the Spot   Tagged: , , , , , ,

Martin Schneider writes:

Seeing Larry David and the cast members of his show Curb Your Enthusiasm (Susie Essman, Cheryl Hines, and Jeff Garlin) as well as a sneak preview of the first episode of Season 8 (it airs on HBO this Sunday) at 92Y of all possible places felt a bit like seeing— the mind gropes for comparisons. The Pope in Rome? Prince in Paisley Park? Oprah in Oprahland?

In other words, the adoration from the audience was total. Indeed, the whole thing was even better because (no spoilers) the episode has a lot to do with Judaism, and this highly Jewish audience (I didn't say "self-loathing") lustily ate it up.

The surprise MC was Brian Williams, and he couldn't have been more perfect or more mock-awkward. His first words were, "Welcome to 'Let's Find a Catholic to Moderate This Event,'" (continued)

3 comments
July062011

Shakespeare: For Mature Teens Only

Filed under: Looked Into   Tagged: , , , ,

Emily Gordon writes:

Readdle’s free Shakespeare app include’s Shakespeare’s complete works, “including doubtful works,” and a searchable concordance. It also has this advisory:

Rated 12+ for the following:
Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity
Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence
Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes
Infrequent/Mild Horror/Fear Themes
Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor
Frequent/Intense Cartoon or Fantasy Violence (continued)

0 comments
2008 Webby Awards Official Honoree
Inkleaf Studio illustration