Notes to Bruce Timm from the Broadcast Standards and Practices (BS&P).
How did Batman the Animated Series ever get on the air?
Excerpt from: Batman Animated, by Paul Dini and Chip Kidd.
Category: amreading
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The Explorers Guild is unique.
It’s structure, pages of prose intertwined with pages of comics, is a format I’ve never seen before.
Most of the comic’s layouts follow this 4 panel design. Illustrator Rick Ross‘s (No. Not that Rick Ross) draftsmanship scales this restraint, bringing the characters to life. The actions and emotions of the characters are believable, despite the limitations.
Check it out here.
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Great are the plunges and throes and triumphs and falls of democracy,
Great the reformers with their lapses and screams,
Great the daring and venture of sailors on new explorations.
A poem for sleepy eyes.
Who are the reformers?
From: Leaves of Grass 150th Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics), pg.156
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Pogba might naturally be tall, powerful, and rangy, but you can find hundreds more across Europe’s top leagues with those attributes. What marked him apart, even as a kid was his work ethic. “I remember telling the group at training one Monday to juggle the ball 50 times with their right foot, 50 times with their left, and 50 times with their head,” recalled another of his coaches at Roissy, Mamadou Papis Magassa. “Paul couldn’t do it. But he spend the next two days with a football, practicing constantly. He came back Wednesday and did it perfectly.”
8by8 Magazine issue 8, All Eyes on Paul. By Paolo Bandini.How did Nicki Bandini (then Paolo) scoop this tale of Paul Pogba? Can you picture young Paul in the back garden practicing his juggling?
Even the gifted need to put in the work.
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Some kids have imaginary friends.
Some kids have real friends.
I had Cascāo comics.
During those long days at my grandma’s apartment I could count on Cascāo to get me through the afternoon.
I didn’t understand Portuguese so I let the drawings tell the story.
Comics make great company. They speak every language.
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Great is today, and beautiful,
It is good to live in this age….there never was any better.
From: Leaves of Grass 150th Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics), pg.156
No better way to celebrate the last day of October than with Walt Whitman.
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If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.
Joan CrawfordGood sentences, enviable sentences even, can be found in places other than books or articles. In his book How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, author and law professor Stanley Fish shares this story:
One nice thing about sentences that display a skill you can only envy is that they can be found anywhere, even when you’re not looking for them. I was driving home listening to NPR and heard a commentator recount a story about the legendary actress Joan Crawford. It seems that she never left the house without being dressed as if she were going to a premiere or a dinner at Sardi’s. An interviewer asked her why. She replied, “If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.”
How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, Stanley Fish. Pg 4Fish breaks it down:
It is the bang-bang swiftness of the short imperative clause-“go next door”- that does the work by taking the commonplace phrase “the girl next door” literally and reminding us that ” next door” is a real place where one should not expect to find glamour (unless of course one is watching Judy Garland singing “The Boy Next Door” in Meet Me in St. Louis).
How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, Stanley Fish. Pg 4 -
I had to add this to my online common place book:
“Remember this, son, if you forget everything else. A poet is a musician who can’t sing. Words have to find a man’s mind before they can touch his heart, and some men’s minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.”
The Name of the Wind. Patrick Rothfuss. pg 106 -
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. By Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren.
It’s a book I hesitated to buy. A book on how to read a book? Come on. I got this.
But people far smarter than I recommended it.
Kevin Kelly mentions it on his selections for the Manual for Civilization. Maria Popova has it listed on her Brain Pickings piece – 9 Books on Reading and Writing.
I clicked BUY NOW.
Structurally I thought it would be a step-by-step guide.
Step 1 – Open the book. Step 2 – Don’t use a highlighter. That sort of thing. Instead it’s broken into topics. Essays on how to read specific topics and genres.
Examples include:
How to Read History
How to Read Philosophy
And the chapter I started with: Suggestions for Reading Stories, Plays, and Poems
Adler and Van Doren’s argument for reading quickly surprised me.
The first piece of advice we would like to give you for reading a story is this: Read it quickly and with total immersion. Ideally, a story should be read at one sitting, although this is rarely possible for busy people with long novels. Nevertheless, the ideal should be approximated by compressing the reading of a good story into as short a time as feasible. Otherwise you will forget what happened, the unity of the plot will escape you and you will be lost.
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. By: Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, pgs 212,213I’m a slow reader. I’m looking to absorb every character in detail. Adler and Van Doren suggest we’ll remember who’s important:
We should not expect to remember every character; many of them are merely background persons, who are there only to set off the actions of the main characters. However, by the time we have finished War and Peace or any big novel, we know who is important, and we do not forget. Pierre, Andrew, Natasha, Princess Mary, Nicholas- the names are likely to come immediately to memory, although it may have been years since we read Tolstoy’s book.
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. By: Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, pg 213They argue this is also true for incidents. We should trust the author to flag what’s important:
We also, despite the plethora of incidents, soon learn what is important. Authors generally give a good deal of help in this respect; they do not want the reader to miss what is essential to the unfolding of the plot, so they flag it in various ways. But our point is that you should not be anxious if all is not clear from the beginning. Actually, it should not be clear then. A story is like life itself; in life, we do not expect to understand events as they occur, at least with total clarity, but looking back on them, we do understand. So the reader of a story, looking back on it after he has finished it, understand the relation of events and the order of actions.
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. By: Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, pg 213A book can lose your attention because it’s not clear in the beginning. I fumbled through the first chapter of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, not sure what was happening. I kept on though. It turned out to be one of the best books I’ve ever read.
Adler and Van Doren on the importance of finishing a book:
All of this comes down to the same point: you must finish a story in order to be able to say that you have read it well.
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. By: Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, pg 213With that, I’m going to give this reading quicker idea a go. Starting with Patrick Rothfuss‘s Name of the Wind.
I’ll report back.
Keep reading.
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Mind Games Ed Piskor’s X-Men Grand Design is a tribute to the X-Men’s past.
It’s also a glimpse into the future. A future where cartoonists take on a mainstream project and execute every stage of the the comic making process.
Read on.
