Jas Faulkner

Reverend William D. Campbell 1924-2013

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willdcampbellby Jas Faulkner

The daily email feed from one of the local papers had two links to stories that showed the city’s religious past and present passing each other in ways that could be seen as fitting, if not entirely ironic.

The first headline, listed as a top story:  Southern Baptists Shrink For Sixth Straight Year. 

The second, which was tabbed under “City News” :   Rev. Will D. Campbell Dies At 88.    

The declining Southern Baptist Convention (or whatever it’s calling itself these days) might have elicited a sage nod from Reverend Campbell, followed by a pithy, decidedly un-PC observation about the state of the Southern Baptist church.  Campbell was nominally a Baptist who was equal parts Jiminy Cricket and a tenacious gadfly towards the conservative religious establishment.

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Typography: From Metal Bits To Bytes

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by Jas Faulkner

typo4It all started with one of those thrift store finds that moves you to dust off and rekindle an old interest. I was there to do my biweekly stuffed animal grab for Niklas Lidstrom -aka-  Destructo the Wonder Shih Tzu when I saw they had cobbled together roughly fifty dollars worth of calligraphy supplies into a ziploc bag and with the asking price of  five dollars.

This is probably a good place to hit the pause button and admit that I’m a big old typography nerd.  It was  a love of letters and alphabets of all kinds that pushed me to major in graphic design at one point in my overlong undergraduate career.   I am still a sucker for typography books and, like any good bibliophile, mourn my 80s’ era spiral-bound typo stylebook.

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I Learned Everything I Ever Needed To Know About Dealing With Jerks From Terry Gilliam

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by Jas Faulkner

gilliam3
This particular doodle might have appeared in an earlier script and was eventually featured as an animated bumper in “The Meaning of Life.”

Why do people draw in books?

A friend of mine borrowed my copy of  the script for Monty Python and the Holy Grail for a scene study class. She returned it with thanks but a grumpy rejoinder about the copious scribbling along the margins. After listening to more grumbling, I finally broke it to her that the bizarre creatures were actually printed in the book. They were the handiwork of the film’s animator and co-director, Terry Gilliam.

She had every reason to believe that the artwork was mine.  However, she had no idea that Gilliam, and for that matter the rest of the artists often still known as Monty Python, had been influences for decades. My father passed his adoration of the Pythons to me when I was stranded in a Tea Party Before There Was A Tea Party prep school in the midwest because his job demanded we live in The Breadbasket of America for a year. It was then that I discovered comedy was a way to stay sane.   Gilliam’s adorably demented creatures gamboled across every Monty Python book I owned.  Of course I copied him.

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Identity Crisis

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by Jas Faulkner    THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding   Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing   Memory and desire, stirring   Dull roots with spring rain.   Winter kept us warm, covering          Earth in forgetful snow, feeding   A little life with dried tubers.-T.S.Eliot … Read more

Community Lives!

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by Jas Faulkner 

litbooksJeremy is finishing a story while Kaia and I look at the clock.  We’re waiting with a dozen other classmates for the big hand to click over to the twelve and the little hand to scoot to the six.  At that point, at least for us, class is in session.

Not that anyone would notice if we were late.

After all, Jeremy is somewhere near Jackson Hole ,  I am in Nashville, Kaia is in Victoria, BC,  and the rest of our study group is scattered all over the globe. Our classroom is a digital  pocket of space and time, an online intellectual stasis chamber situated somewhere in 2009 at Yale.  Open Yale Courses  is home to English 300 Introduction to the Theory of Literature, a class that the fifteen of us watch as a group and then discuss in a private email list for the rest of the week.  It is one of the forty-five online courses Yale offers free of charge to anyone with a desire to know more.

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Library Voyeurism: Admit It. You Do It, Too!

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by Jas Faulkner

library2welOne of the advantages of the current technology available for photo sharing is the ability to find details that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Thanks to less expensive digital imaging and social media, we have all seen recent pictures of ghosts, Big Foot, Chupacabras, Elvis, Tupac, and fiends deeply buried in our couch cushions.

Through the pictures we scan and then expand we have discovered the lost libraries of our friends, our family and our childhoods.

We all do it.  We see a picture of a book case int he background and our first impulse is to try to read the titles on the spines. Photos from my own late sixties to early seventies childhood reveals as much about my parents’ aspiration for me and my brother as it does about their thirst to continue their educations.

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Abandon Hope, Ye Seekers of Customer Service!

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by Jas Faulkner

Here’s the thing about me and customer service:  I know there are wonderful people who work the phones and chat lines.  They manage to make the experience of correcting someone else’s mess up as painless as possible.  Most of the time, I am lucky enough to get one of those hardworking people who are filling a position that is often thankless and hideously underpaid.  I love those people.  In fact, I usually send letters to call centers and compliment people who make it a point to not provide me with fodder for articles like this one.

However, there are times when I get people who have turned contrarian ineptitude into a piece of performance art that would send Diamanda Galas into a corner to weep softly and wave away a fit of the vapors so she could get back to terrifying unsuspecting music lovers.

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