Platypus of Truth

It all started with a whiteboard doodle during a brainstorm session in study hall. We were experimenting with pitches.  Suddenly, the room synergized and a story began rolling out with the force of a freight train. We had an idea -a great idea. How often do our thoughts come back to us with an alienated majesty? We discard them because they are our thoughts. Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance  with my students this year, this passage struck me with the force of that freight train. Do I distrust my own thoughts simply because they are mine and not some paid authority? In a democratic nation, creators crave the votes of the masses; votes in the form of dollars. As the 51% (hoi poloi) become the arbiters of Right and Wrong, so the Paid Position tells us what is worthy (to agathon) and unworthy (to kakon) of our attention. Plato taught that we do evil through lack of knowledge. No person would knowingly choose the bad since the bad would inevitably harm themselves...

I'm always a day late and a dollar short to things. In this case, it's about two years late. Late to what, you ask? Well, my wife and I finally got around to seeing Cartoon Network's mini-series "Over the Garden Wall". It's a show about two brother who become lost in the woods and travel through an eerie feast of New England Americana seasoned with a with worthy of Homestar Runner . In short, it's the show I wish I was brilliant enough to create. As Emerson might say, it was my own thought come back to me with an alienated majesty . Beyond it's carefully researched aesthetic, the show is a delight for the classically educated. The bleeding edelwood trees have their true home in Dante's Inferno  while the talking beasts and witches' cabins are firmly rooted in the Brothers Grimm. There are subtle grecco-roman touches too: the need for two coins to take the ferry across the river, for instance. "Over the Garden Wall" is on DVD and c...

Not my all-time favorite Dickens book, but it has it's moments. Here we have a pen and brush marker rendition of a whiteboard doodle I did to help my students along. We're such a visual culture that some rudimentary art skills are almost a requirement for teaching these days.

The academic year is always exhausting and with a new position this year there hasn't been much time for reading anything that's not school related. However, I have managed to slip in a few treasures nonetheless. *Warning: Hellboy in Hell  spoilers* The first of those is the final installment of Mike Mignola's Hellboy saga: Hellboy in Hell: The Death Card . How do you end a series that has been going for twenty years? Hellboy's violent career as Anung un Rama, the World Destroyer, would argue a Big Bang. Unlike the movies, however, Mignola's Hellboy has always been more about the brooding silences and carefully worded dialog than the fights. We had our epic battle with the Dragon in The Storm and the Fury. In The Death Card , tough Hellboy harrows hell, defeats Behemoth and Leviathan, and slays the princes of Pandemonium, it is all done with a somber finality that rises above the the frenetic furor of an Avengers  or Batman Versus Superman: Dawn of Justice . In ...