Comics and newspapers

Stephen Pastis, creator of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, is worried:

"Newspapers are declining," he says. "For a syndicated cartoonist, that's like finally making it to the major leagues and being told the stadiums are all closing, so there's no place to play."

The Comics Are Feeling the Pain of Print (New York Times)

Patsis sees online distribution as the future of comics. The Times also cites Brian Walker, part of the team behind Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, who thinks that comics are best appreciated on paper.

(Thanks to Jason Scott for pointing me to this article. Thanks, Jason!)

Harvey Pekar, opera collaborator

Harvey Pekar is writing a libretto:

Pekar and former Cleveland Heights jazz saxophonist Dan Plonsey will premiere Leave Me Alone! on Jan. 31 at Oberlin College's Finney Chapel. The performance will be webcast. . . .

Pekar has a simple reason for accepting the job with the Real Time Opera Company, a New Hampshire-based performing-arts organization formed in 2002 to promote new opera.

"The Real Time Opera Company offered me money to write the libretto for an opera, so I figured 'Why not?'" Pekar said. "These days, I hate to turn money down."

Harvey Pekar teams with saxophonist to stage jazz opera (The Plain Dealer)

Read more:

Leave Me Alone! (Real Time Opera)

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[Note to the Real Time Opera webmaster: "Streamed Live 1/31/2009 8 PM" will leave many people wondering when to watch. Please, add the time zone. Thanks!]

[Update: It's 8 EST.]

Trixie? TRIXIE?? (Hi and Lois)

No doors? No mirrors? No seat belts? No problem! A hologram for a driver? C'est okay! But where's Trixie?

Trixie was last seen on Christmas Eve, playing with a box beneath a goth Christmas tree. But come Christmas morning, she was gone. "You don't cut back on Christmas," Lois said, but you do cut back on the number of characters in the strip, I guess. These are tough times, and we all must make sacrifices.

Is there a storyline shaping up here? I mean, one whose name is something other than Cher Carelessness?

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The New York Times on Christmas

If you look back at the photos of Christmas 50 years ago — not that long a time, really — you can see what a simple place it once was. What you wanted for Christmas was a very short list of possibilities, and what you got was usually the single most possible thing on the list, plus a few of the articles your mother thought you needed. The intent was the same as it is now, more or less, but the means were so much fewer.

From an editorial on Christmas then and now (or then and then again):

When Christmas Comes (New York Times)

A Louis Armstrong Christmas

Here's Louis Armstrong reading Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" (aka "The Night Before Christmas"), at home in Corona, Queens, New York, February 26, 1971. It's Armstrong's last recording:

"The Night Before Christmas" (YouTube)

"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night."

[Discographical information from The Louis Armstrong Discography.]

A third Jane Austen character speaks

Fanny Price, what think you of this shrubbery?

"This is pretty — very pretty," said Fanny, looking around her as they were thus sitting together one day: "Every time I come into this shrubbery I am more struck with its growth and beauty. Three years ago, this was nothing but a rough hedgerow along the upper side of the field, never thought of as any thing, or capable of becoming any thing; and now it is converted into a walk, and it would be difficult to say whether most valuable as a convenience or an ornament; and perhaps in another three years we may be forgetting — almost forgetting what it was before. How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!" And following the latter train of thought, she soon afterwards added: "If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient — at others, so bewildered and so weak — and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond controul! — We are to be sure a miracle every way — but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out."

From Mansfield Park (1814)

Fanny's slight revision — "we may be forgetting — almost forgetting" — carries great poignance. Her past life with her immediate family is something she would never want to forget. Her inferior status among the members of her extended family is something she is never allowed to forget.

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A second Jane Austen character speaks

Do, please, Mr Rushworth, continue:

"If I must say what I think," continued Mr Rushworth, "in my opinion it is very disagreeable to be always rehearsing. It is having too much of a good thing. I am not so fond of acting as I was at first. I think we are a great deal better employed, sitting comfortably here among ourselves, and doing nothing."

From Mansfield Park (1814)

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A Jane Austen character speaks

Woolworths to close

Woolworths is closing its 807 stores in Great Britain. From the New York Times:

The simple act of walking inside the soon-to-be-gone Woolworths on Portobello Road in West London had a madeleine-like effect on a number of shoppers the other day, releasing a string of long-ago memories.

Woolworths, 27-year-old Nick Clinch said, was the treat he looked forward to more than anything on Saturday mornings as a child, clutching the precious 50 pence his parents gave him when they visited him at boarding school. Woolworths was where Tracy McManus's daughter, now a grown-up singer, bought her first hit single, "Into the Groove" by Madonna, having been introduced to it on the television show "Top of the Pops" that very day.

And it was where the young Lena Smith took her pennies and spent them on the luridly colored candy known as Pic 'n' Mix, feeling independent and flush with consumer power.

"All we had was Woolworths," said Ms. Smith, now 50 and carting around a basket stuffed with items, including a dozen polka-dot mugs and a horse-themed 2009 calendar. "It was the first big shopping place for us. It was our shopping experience."

The Doors Shut on an Emporium Offering a Hodgepodge of Essentials (New York Times)

The company website and the Woolworths Virtual Museum are both down, at least for now.

Thanks to my friend Stefan Hagemann for pointing me to this article. Thanks, Stefan!

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"WOOLCO"

A Jane Austen character speaks

Lady Bertram? We are ready for you. Go ahead, please:

"Mr Rushworth," said Lady Bertram, "if I were you, I would have a very pretty shrubbery. One likes to get out into a shrubbery in fine weather."

From Mansfield Park (1814)

Domestic comedy

"Is that what it's called, or did you just make that up?"

"Both."

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