My brother G, an iPhone enthusiast, sent me an email the other day regarding a service call he’d made to AT&T Wireless. The email went, my emphasis:

word of the day… i learned from AT&T CUSTOMER SERVICE REP

frustrational, synonymous (i think) with frustrating… as in “i know that is frustrational…”

wow…

I enjoy pointless faux-Latin suffixes, and I enjoy words/signs that perform the very acts they mean to capture abstractly. The word frustrational is, albeit only mildly, actually frustrating.

I was not sure, after reading G’s email, that I’d ever feel frustrationalized, even if I knew I’d often feel frustrated. But I still laughed and copied the word into my mental florilegium, somewhere between frotteur and fulvous.

I then spent some hours editing the Atlas Obscura, an online encyclopedia of naturally or historically wondrous places and collections of curiosities.

If you’re headed out of town and want to see something besides yet another Denny’s water closet, search the Atlas. Waterfall of primordial blood? Check. Garden of poisonous plants? Sure. Living bridges made of massive entwined roots? Why not.

The Atlas is relaxing to edit and inspiring to read. Its entries are almost entirely inoffensive. They widen the world without challenging it. They are written to inform. Nothing about the project is harsh by design; the Atlas, like other moderated wikis, appeals to a broad audience.

So I was naturally surprised and even frustrationalized when the New Yorker, a once-notable journal of centrist politics, mediocre fiction, and blurry inscrutable cartoons about cat-psychiatrists and men trapped on desert islands with various supernumerary household appliances, published on its website this bizarre and seemingly off-topic review of a new patch of internet esoterica that I not only enjoy reading but actually edit.

The review is neither scathing nor adoring. The reviewer says she/he is “not immune” to the Atlas’ charms. But then the reviewer refuses to engage with the site on its own terms. The reviewer claims the Atlas is branded as a “club or society,” which isn’t true: The Atlas describes itself only as a “compendium” and “collaborative project.”

Inaccurate reporting aside, the tone of the review is off. Why does the reviewer mention Wes Anderson, for example? To my knowledge, Mr. Anderson makes twee, fantastical movies about immature man-boys of the type often played by the Wilson brothers. I like his movies, sure, and he does mention exotic, faraway places like Texas, but he’s hardly cornered the market on “exotic” or historical art.  (And the Atlas isn’t fiction. It’s nerd love pur sang. It’s an encyclo-freakin-pedia!)

The use of the name “Wes Anderson” in a review of a project undertaken by young scholars feels to me not like a valid jab at privileged knowitalls, but like a flailing attempt on the part of the New Yorker to participate in the discourse of hip. Their review of the decidedly non-twee Atlas reminds me of some technophobic friends’ scathing opinions of Twitter, a site these friends have never actually visited.

It’s not surprising that the fear of the unknown should follow us from the newsprint era into the era of the all-connective Web. Too, it’s not weird that the New Yorker should worry about its relevance. Frankly, it may not be especially relevant. It has clout; it frequently publishes good writing. But lots of magazines and sites publish good writing. Increasingly, clout is going to run downhill, from the dinosaurs to the more adaptable mammals of the publishing world.

I’m just surprised that the New Yorker would try to engage the world of cool, hip, twee, [insert adjective you think the New Yorker thinks is synonymous with "cool"] via a tactic so blatant. Like the chubby boy in fourth grade who can only let the pretty girl know he “like” likes her by spitting on her Bedazzled jeans-jacket, the New Yorker finds a cooler, younger site and wants to do… something… to/with/for it. But it ultimately proves a mite lost, unsure how to use its cultural clout and toward what end.

The Atlas has, in its first few weeks of life, garnered hundreds of followers from around the world, not to mention good reviews from Time and Metro. No doubt the New Yorker will continue to flail and look lost. I don’t need to extrude my syllogistic inklings very far to feel good about my own generation’s efforts to write well, explore the world, and perhaps - just perhaps - make it a little less of an old-white-dude-with-a-monocle kind of a place.

Friend and writer-adventurer Mr. Dylan Thuras (of the Atlas Obscura) recently brought to my attention the work of one Mr. Colin Low, author of both the best history and counter-history of the Necronomicon on the net.

Read in succession, Low’s Anti-FAQ and apologia for that Anti-FAQ explain what the Necronomicon is (H. P. Lovecraft’s recurring MacGuffin-grimoire, full of all sorts of evil gnostic gossip from beyond time and space), what it isn’t (real), and why so many would-be readers, myself included, care.

For my money, Low nails the book’s allure here:

I believe the importance of the Necronomicon is twofold:

• it is believed to reflect a modern consciousness of reality
• it is believed to be authoritative

As a lost evil text from another dimension, dictated to a mad Damascene before the First Crusade, the Necronomicon does not exist. But the possibility of its existence and the role it continues to play in literature, religion, and the rhizomatic maze-tunnels of the internet give it a special power over its would-be readers. One of the most talked-about artifacts to have never existed, the book’s form and content are indeed shaped by those who talk about it, making it a truly postmodern, truly potential text.

For those interested, various translations of the book exist. Versions based on the movies of Sam Raimi and Lovecraftian versions probably differ in the style and substance of their bulldada, but both will seriously up your hinter-culture street-cred.

In any event, hats off, Mr. Colin Low, to your exhaustive study of a fake book. You earn this week’s Honourable Badge Of Merit, the first to be given on this website.

Reading strong prose inspires me. 2666 makes me want to go to Mexico and solve terrible crimes, or to write a novel about a Mexican detective, or to at least publish a novel under the name Archimboldi. In the same way, I often find myself inspired to write while reading insipid prose. But even more than make me want to write, bad prose makes me think in a certain unfettered way.

Like making coffee or taking a long shower, mentally excoriating bad writing as I read it frees up parts of my mind normally reserved for creating anxiety. Newly unbidden, these anxiously creative parts think amok, farting forth strange ideas. (Demi-tangent: Steven Bach once told me that the most difficult narrative knots of screenplays often unravel in the shower. And what Steven said is true for all types of narrative writing, even if my screenplays will always be too long and too weird to produce.)

Sometimes, though, I can’t tell whether the prose I’m reading is bad or merely distinct, perhaps a little alien. I read a sentence, experiencing it as “bad,” enjoying its badness. Then I go back and see that it’s not bad in the way I thought it was. Maybe my reading was too literal, too schizoid, too connective, too green, too moon. Then I change my mind again. Reading this type of ambiguously “bad” prose, I become more and more reflective, until I lose the overall thread of what I was reading in the first place.

Take for instance this perfectly intelligible sentence from the article “U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny” in the New York Times:

Nuns were the often-unsung workers who helped build the Roman Catholic Church in this country, planting schools and hospitals and keeping parishes humming.

Nuns planting schools? It’s an image right out of the Codex Seriphinianus. For some reason, it struck me when I read it as overly cute, the wrong action. Planting a building, perhaps, makes a certain metaphorical sense. But would you say that you plant an institution, with staff and students and conflicting schedules and a night-janitor cleaning up a healthy smear of inexplicable bat guano in the computer lab? Given the calculus of schools, maybe they can be seeded or grown. But planting doesn’t do it for me.

Consider also the medieval/pastoral notion of a whole parish humming along together, literally. It’s a properly nun-like act, the organization of co-humming. Humming is harmonious, otherworldly, and communal in a chaste way. “Parish humming” conjures up an image of all of church-dense Brooklyn taking to the streets to join hands and hum a song by, I dunno, Journey or Beyoncé. (Probably Journey. Everybody sings that one fucking song, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” at karaoke.)

At the same time, we now have arboreal schools (or schoolchildren?), I suppose growing out of the tilled field of America (or knowledge?), and a bunch of parishioners (kept) humming, which humming doesn’t necessarily have squat to do with the arboreal school/kids. I find my orthography grows cluttered as I try to untangle the sentence’s metaphors. The images clash and, perhaps ecstatically, perhaps in a good way, kill each other off , as if in autumnal cannibalism.

By way of a sweeping conclusion, I should add that the nun-article is a good read for reasons other than the sentence about humming that tripped me up. Nuns apparently face a new inquisition from the Holy See, where lady-suits and reiki are still not cool. I know the Pope likes to preserve tradition and rigor, but nuns aren’t exactly the problem, are they?

Then again, perhaps the brides of Christ are tweeting and debating stocking-propriety on the boards of Nike Talk.

O modernity. You rock.

I’ve been reading a lot of the Atlas Obscura of late, thinking about the job of cataloging the irretrievable, unmanageable past. This morning, my daily email from the New York Times included the headline “A Historian Is On A Quest To Locate Lost Events,” which piqued my inner amateur historian quite a bit.

Unfortunately, the questing soul featured in the article, Andrew Carroll, runs only a spartan website on which there’s little actual lost-event locating to be found. He mentions a blog but doesn’t link to it. Weird.

Weirder, perhaps, is Carroll’s URL, “hereiswhere.org/Here_Is_Where/Here_Is_Where.” Why the deuce, the rhizomatist wonders, would you not forge ahead simply with “hereiswhere.org,” an elegant, koan-like URL? Or even “hereiswhere.org/home,” a nod to convention? Or might I suggest “hereiswhere.org/whereishere/hereiam,” or some other act of play?

Officially, all word-hijinks aside, I salute Carroll and his ilk for wandering down that hallway of the past. My only admonition, I borrow from novelist Andrei Bitov, who writes in Pushkin House:

He expresses the evasively simple idea that it is equally false, if not more so, to infer a historical picture of a given age solely from data that are few and extremely meager. The contemporary of an age and his historian move toward each other in darkness, but this is a bizarre simultaneity, for the contemporary exists no more, and the historian not yet. The few things that the historian sees when he looks back are too clear to him; to the contemporary, they are engulfed by life. Why, one might ask, if a scholar succeeds in establishing something with precision, does it seem to have become more obvious and better known in the past? The scholar, more often than the dramatist, succumbs to the delusion that every gun fires.

• Book From The Sky, Xu Bing
• The Lottery Man, Benno von Archimboldi
• Margites, Homer
• Black Batman of the North, Part II, Henry Chettle & Robert Wilson, according to Philip Henslowe
• Ur-Hamlet, Thomas Kyd (?)
• Book Of The Wars Of The Lord, ? (a biblical writer insanely good at titling books/just plain insane)
• Quipu, the [according to some, telepathic] Incans

Today, friends, is a glorious day, because despite all the petty and noble terrors of the earth, there is the internet, and it yields forth so many fructifants, some mango-like (lusty, wet), some pomegranate (jeweled, secret), some fig (sweet, gritty, leathern), others jerky (turkeyfied) or ape-brain (clay-y, monosodium glutamate-ish).

Here I have tallied only a small portion of the multiple lode:

• Vin Diesel loves Dungeons & Dragons. (Thanks to Julianne Smolinski, writer and professional genius, for the heads-up.)
• Billy Bob Thronton hates both Canada and acting. And isn’t all that into music, either. Which is strange when you think about the guy’s life, spent acting, playing music, and (at times) touring Canada. (Why do we do the things we loathe? Baudelaire couldn’t help us there; I’m not even going to try, je regrette.)
• My sometimes hero/sometimes nemesis Nicholas Kristof is bored by words, which I long suspected.
• Finally, I now know the joys of RSS (”really simple syndication”/”rich site summary”/”read sexy snippets”), thanks to (who else) Google. I feel like all the previous RSS readers were working too hard to promote themselves and not hard enough to show me the multiple Infinities of web content.

Of course, speaking of infinity, it’s gotta be nice to be Google: Like Dan Flavin, John Cage, Sam Beckett, you’ve got your discourse’s version of Minimalism on lock. You never have to do more work than [white page, Logo], as long as you back up said Minimal steez with un-fuckable-with functionality.

And with the help of said functionality, what day is not full of wondrous charm, here in the internet?

I write “in the internet” but can just as well write “through, via, by way of, thanks to, courtesy, all over, throughout the internet,” or any prepositional phrase that does not imply “through the internet,” since there is no mystic Other Side, no transcendent meaning, no final answer, no wizard behind the curtain (unless Vin Diesel is hanging out behind a curtain; that dude loves spellcasting).

The internet, without center, without king or tyrannical convention of democrats, may be the first true rhizome, the first deterritorializing machine, that which consumes and strips of transcendent meaning, applying all meanings to all surfaces to produce (more) all meanings (again, different). (And I am far from the first to suggest as much.)

The other night my brother G and I caught up with some ex-coworkers whom we hadn’t seen in a long time. One, M, is a development officer at a major theater. Her husband, J, is a lawyer. M and J could ask about my job—”How is your writing going? Are you writing?”—but I found it impossible to ask the reverse without resorting to instant jargon: “How is your developmenting? Are you still lawyering?”

True, M could be said to be “developing” something, but that’s not really what a development officer does, I think. She probably raises money, markets theater, supervises benefits, mails donors, &c. Likewise, a lawyer might teach law, practice law, write law, argue law—but he doesn’t just law, nakedly. He don’t be “lawing around,” like some knucklehead.

It strikes me as strange that we English-speakers face a paucity of verbs for what we do, despite our cultural preoccupation with trade and class. At least, for all its loneliness, eye-strain, and half-mad symbolizing, “writing” is a straightforward, verby sort of thing to do. (”Signing” and “texting” are fun as well.)

I guess the only other verbing I’d put on the same plane as writing (which needs neither adverb—”singing clearly“—nor object—”drinking wine“) is an ur-simple, ubiquitous jargon-artifact of the early, Wild West days of online gaming:

“How’s your pwning been recently?”

(”Oh, same old. Many newbs 2 pwn, never enuff thyme.”)

• Codex Seraphinianus, Luigi Serafini
• The Rohonc Codex, ?
• The Voynich Manuscript, ?
• Rongo-Rongo, the Rapanui (the native people of Easter Island)
• The Garden of Forking Paths, Ts’ui Pen

It is not too difficult to discern the shadows of an Oedipal drama swimming below the surface. Here is the baffling, autocratic father represented most powerfully by the image of Andre the Giant (whose positive counterpart is the Good Father Obama). There is the beguiling, possibly dangerous mother embodied in many images of nameless, alluring female warriors. And the son is portrayed in pictures of Joey Ramone, Sid Vicious and other young rebels who would stand in for Mr. Fairey himself and who would depose and replace the Bad Father.

—Ken Johnson, New York Times, 17 Mar., 2009.

Joey Ramone gets a hyperlink while Oedipus, Freud, Bush, and Obama get nada. Also hyperlinked, earlier in the article, are Led Zeppelin and Andy Warhol. I’m seeing a potential trend. Mr. Johnson equates Shepard Fairey with pop, populism, canned “rebellion,” fading and faded fads, and the acquisitive-capitalistic urge to sell la Revolution to the rebels.

This is perhaps a good way to enter into Fairey’s world of late. Andre the Giant, now a motif for thousand-dollar handbags. Like Murakami Takashi, Fairey is enjoying post-indie/post-rebel popularity. He’s spreading his ideas and probably saving a few bucks.

But Mr. Johnson also dismisses Fairey’s art as impersonal and predictable, as if these characteristics are not found throughout the annals of art. The impersonal aside, what is Warhol, what Roy Lichtenstein, if not a little predictable?

My own favorites (Schiele, Dalí, Picasso, Kandinksy, Ernst, Tanguy, Giacometti) are perfectly predictable: If you’ve seen “The Persistence of Memory” (the drippy clocks painting), for example, you can probably identify other Dalís. (Look for ants, lions, clocks, vaginas, burning giraffes, furniture, transfiguring messianic depictions of his wife—all battling it out on the Catalonian waste at eventide.)

My point is simply that predictability is not necessarily the great enemy of art. All art, in a sense, is art-by-formula, even if that formula is “always do something different.” Most artists, as rebellious as they may be, want to be associated with their own work (predicted). They want to be identified with their own “artist”-ness.

Fairey—good or bad, pop sell-out or tru skreet innovator—has created certain memes. His Andre the Giant/Obey campaign has influenced thousands of other artists, whose work can be seen in some ways as Fairey-esque (again, regardless of whether that makes such devotees progressives or idiots).

Moreover, visual artists (like writers) “quarry out” genres and forms and themes. (This idea I got from Robert Alter’s Rogue’s Progress.) We only have X number of years on earth; we only have Z number of interests. Trying to cover too much ground inspires some artists, keeps them on their toes. Others find a single zahir/idea/theme/grail so intriguing that they never need to (never can) look away. (In the literary world, look at Thomas Bernhard. Or listen to the falling-apart rhythm-language of Beckett, from Watt to Molloy to How It Is.)

Look at Maya Lin or Richard Serra: Their geographic art is stunning, timeless, and open; it makes us look at our own world in a new way; waves of earth and mountains of steel remind us of our own inelegant smallness and mortality. And yet both Lin and Serra move in perfectly predictable patterns.

If Serra started painting miniatures of ponies and kittens (the way poet John Ashbery started making collages of pin-up girls and cacti), then he’d lose some predictability. He would not necessarily gain “innovation.” Innovation—adding some new tool to the box of art, expanding what art is, showing previous ideas in a new light, changing how we show anything at all—is not the opposite of predictability, which, while staid-sounding, is nonetheless bound up with the very idea of association-over-time and thus of identity. We are ourselves only when we are predictable. The more we defy patterns, prevent identification, escape meanings, the more we label ourselves “crazy” (or prophetic).

Not that a certain measure of unpredictability is isn’t necessary, especially in art. Perhaps surprising-the-self is good for the self; it adds options, clarifies past choices. Recently I cut my hair. Now I surprise myself when I look in the mirror. If the artist is a mirror held up the world and the societies of the world, then perhaps we do want to be surprised now and again by our own collective appearance. Someone has to cut our hair. Back in his Andre days, perhaps that barber was Fairey. In his handbag days (today), I’m not sure.

Of course, to spin the question of associations-with-self around yet another axis altogether, it’s always possible that someone co-opts your own “predictable” style, perhaps years after your death, for their own purposes. Check out the familiar painting styles of Dalí and Ernst, now selling cars. Or do as Mr. Johnson recommends and compare Fairey’s provocative anti-war prints with Maoist posters.

Either way, what is predictable today will be innovative tomorrow (”retro”); and what once seemed gloriously strange (Dalí, Andre’s mug telling me to OBEY) will soon seen worthy of the MoMA store, at best, or the collective catalogue of overly familiar “hip” T-shirts, at worst.  (Right next to “Cougar Hunter,” “Canada: America’s Hat,” and of course Che.)

Formula rex, formula mortis. *

(* Or something like that. I learned all my Latin from the names of dinosaurs, who I hear tell were both highly unpredictable and impersonal, like a bunch of gargantuan mesothermic clones of Rush Limbaugh, on acid.)

From Judy Battista’s “For Cardinals and Steelers, Differing Pasts and Expectations,” New York Times, 21 January, 2009:

The Cardinals could be excused for letting their giddiness overwhelm them a little longer after earning their first trip to the Super Bowl. They have spent nearly their entire history being a team apart, peripatetic and sometimes even a little pathetic. Nobody wears vintage Cardinals jerseys, because, like wine turned to vinegar, the vintage was always pretty sour. That makes their unexpected arrival this year all the sweeter.

Now, I understand that sour wine is nasty, and that the Cardinals are nasty; ergo the analogical function of the metaphor is complete (nasty old Cardinal jersey : remembered-sense of Cardinal’s nastiness, in NFL :: old, cheap wine, turned to vinegar : felt-sense taste of vinegary sour nastiness, in mouth).

But the analogy I have just now reconstructed is not actually present in Battista’s insane simile. She says: (vintage Cardinal jersey : wine[?] :: vinegar : sourness, both as nasty prior experience and as felt-sense of sour taste in mouth), which makes no sense at all. You can’t wear a liquid, at least not for long, at least not so long as you want to be a pro baller.

And the Cardinals, according to her, never were “wine.” They never had a golden era or Namath or Joe Montana or Plaxico; ergo they never had “vintage” jerseys which could “sour.” So the thesis of her simile, that the Cardinals have a “sour vintage,” is broken, an example of overreaching not just in rhetoric (using a simile that doesn’t make sense in place of a sturdier species of description) but also in sports history—by her own account of it.

Further, to reconstruct any football franchise’s past failures as “sour” is a leap into culinary metaphor that I am not totally willing to make. We sometimes describe as “bitter” those past experiences that we regret; we certainly do describe positive remembered events and subsequent affect as “sweet.” I have even thought of some experiences as “hot” or as having left me “cold.”

But sour is tricky; I think of Chinese food, lemons, and lemon-scented cleaning fluids. I certainly don’t think “sour” is a bad way to describe failures and the feelings failures engender; it’s only that a fallen franchise or vintage or pedigree as “sour” is a specific extension of this (new) notion of failure as sour. Fallen, sour, once-gold, tarnished…

Again, we’d need our real clement, the franchise (or whatever it is) to have been positive, powerful, or successful at some point in the past. The souring describes a process. Wine is sweet; wine gone sour is vinegar, a new substance. This alchemy of liquid (wine —> vinegar [ —> mother-of-vinegar { —> mold}]) mirrors the alchemy of the franchise (Michael Jackson c. Thriller —> okaaay, so he likes monkeys, music kind of falling off 90s MJ —> crazy bankrupt toucher MJ) which mirrors the linguistic process by which we arrive at a description of that franchise ([{good —> } neutral —> ] failed —> gone bad —> gone bitter or been tarnished or bruised or rusted —> “soured”).

I would add that this process even mirrors my reading of Battista’s metaphor, which went something like: (bad simile —> wait, didn’t she just say the Cardinals were never any good? —> “peripatetic” makes me think of feet, sweaty feet, gross, sour —> what a wack sentence; I don’t really know what she intended to say —> let me try to sort this out).

Perhaps if we could wear wine (or vinegar), I would have less of an issue with Battista’s surely little reflected-upon choice. Perhaps I am missing something innate in wine or in the Cardinals (tannins? sulfites?) that would connect the various clements in the metaphor, creating a happy new association. But for now, I think of sweaty, sweat feet and bitter-sour vinegar, and I don’t for a moment wonder why I avoid football just exactly as I avoid the gout, because, like the gout, football is a painful medical condition. Or something like that.

Says an actual sports fan, friend and fellow writer Jake of Bread City:

That metaphor makes no sense whatsoever, and you’ve pretty much nailed down all the angles on its complete terribleness… Just more reason that this writer is a total moron: The Cardinals actually had some of the best jerseys in the 90s, and any true fan knows that nothing gets you more points than an old jersey that proves you’ve been on board since before your team was good. Sigh.

Jake also recommends that we would-be sports-deconstructors check out Straight Cash Homey Dot Net, a daily review of sports-jersey culture. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be looking at here; the site mostly consists of snapshots of men wearing jerseys, showing off their Local Sports Franchise Enthusiasm, or, as I plan to call it from now on, their “Lospofram.” Sounds like a heart drug.

Wythe Marschall… tells a fable about a legendary kangaroo king. The king presided over a fairy-tale court wherein only anecdotal evidence was permitted. One day the king fell ill (a grasshopper jumped into his pouch), but before he died (official cause: confluxication of the rhinomphalos) he told a parable about a king and a grasshopper. We, his subjects, couldn’t parse the king’s allegory until a dolphin named Jacques Derrida pointed out that we were trapped in the fable I’m telling. Then everybody had lemonade and Mexican beer.

***

Some people think postmodern philosophy is depressing. Well this pun—a Derrida snippet, on a Derrida conference, about being the guy the conference is all about, about feeling dead while still alive—proves them all wrong:

If I am applied Derrida, how can I bear being here? It’s unbearable. To be dead without being dead: unburyable.

(Emphasis added.)

J. D. was always punnin’.

The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.

—Norbert Wiener, Philosophy of Science (1945) (with A. Rosenblueth).

Courtesy my brother G., an aphorism about the best command-model for cat-thinking-about: Think about the cat you actually have. Problem of cat-concept solved.

This brings up the hilarity of phenomenology in general: What is the best (the only) description of a thing? The thing. (The thing beyond description. Chillin in its own little multiverse of thing-ness.)

Applies also to music: “What’s DOOM’s new album sound like?” “Well, you know—[insert comparison to other DOOM albums], [insert me humming a few bars]. It’s good.” Which is not to say that I wouldn’t enjoy going into figurative overdrive to describe DOOM’s work—only that my description would be inadequate for someone with little or no experience of paratactic/rhizomatic rap music about food, cartoons, and rap music.

This is all to say: I anticipate eagerly the new DOOM album, and if I have to paint a cat, I guess I have to paint my own cat, even if neither of us knuckleheads is happy about that situation.

Video/design expert and friend Patrick Davison designed Hello Cthulhu; lunchboxes and mousepads soon to come. H.P. Lovecraft was a top-notch bastard; this image would have probably driven him to an early (and soon unearthed) grave:

Writer and friend C.J. Hauser draws single-panel cartoons, every single day.

In terms of “famous” cartoonists and other drawers, I must note Partially Clips and Achewood (again), which have severely influenced my own stances toward talking animals and fourth-wall destruction.