Be careful what you wish for

I dreamed of a life in which I could make a living reading and writing, and do so independently: a life where I was in charge. I did a number of difficult things in order to make this come to pass. But tonight, years later, as I reap the fruits of same, my life is reminding me of something from my childhood.

TIME: the present

PLACE: my house

CAST:

Water ..... Words
Brooms .... Books
Mickey .... Moi

A new name for books

Some time in the early 1980s I was introduced by a friend to the work of US cartoonist Garry Trudeau, the first cartoonist ever to win a Pulitzer. I immediately became, and have remained, a rusted-on devotee, reading the cartoons daily, saving favourites, buying the collections and, since Doonesbury went online, reading the strip every day. Most of what I know about the US is stuff that I have learned, or deduced, or intuited, from reading Trudeau's cartoons and the responses to them in the Blowback section of the website.

A friend in Abu Dhabi, apparently as reliant on the BBC World Service as several other Anglophone friends in non-Anglophone countries have been over the years and therefore likely to hear all kinds of good stuff, said today that she'd heard Trudeau being interviewed recently and recommended it. It's here. I recommend it too.

I see at the Doonesbury site that there's a de luxe publication out to mark the 40th anniversary of the strip. Like a lot of the advertising of Trudeau's books in the past, the ad subverts itself and works as a kind of extension of the strip by touting Doonesbury merchandise in mock down-market advertising language, today including a new synonym for 'books': old-media ownables.