danelope obviously retains more of the evening than I do.
Oh dear. Oh dearie me.
Befuddle Hall
The Cartoonist passed on a plea the other day for someone to translate a few lines of dialog from Dutch to English in an old cartoon found tucked inside a book.
The original statement of curiosity originated here, with what was clearly a Dutch translation of a Little Nemo strip printed in black and white.
I recognized McCay’s hand and thought I had a copy of the original in one book or another and asked Ralf to put me in touch with Rob. We corresponded a bit, whereupon I learned that he was unfamiliar with Winsor McCay.
I dug out the book and copied the dialog, sending it to him with some links to McCay resources on the intarweb.
I assumed that the piece was a translation of the Little Nemo original; the images I saw looked familiar as part of a long sequence in which Flip, Nemo, and the Imp are wandering through Morpheus’ castle. I have several of the Fanagraphics reprints and thought I might be able to locate the piece.
I seem to recall something about early seventies bootleg Dutch reprints of Nemo preceding US reprints by a couple of years. I may have read that these reprints influenced Joost Swarte, who so clearly has looked at McCay (among other early cartoonists) pretty closely.
McCay also is widely credited as the inventor of animation, for his Gertie the Dinosaur films, and is remembered in the ongoing Kim Deitch Waldo epic as a frustrated old man, aggravated at the way the his inheritors had commercialized the form
Here’s a wikipedia article on Nemo.
The period in the strip which the images are drawn from is known as the “Befuddle Hall” sequence.
I have it in several republications. This transcription is taken from page 110 of “the Best of Little Nemo in Slumberland,” edited by Richard Marschall.
FRAME ONE
Nemo (on the left, in policeman’s cap):
I wish we had never come into this Befuddle Hall in the first place.
Flip (to right, in cap, appears bearded and with cigar):
That isn’t the question now, it’s how are we going to get out.
FRAME TWO
N: The whole affair seems to be sideways. It makes me dizzy.
F: There’s a hall running up and down and crossways! Don’t fall in, now, hear?
FRAME THREE
N: Let’s give ourselves up when we get out of here, eh, Flip?
F: Let’s get out first! Whoever named this Befuddle Hall knew his business!
FRAME FOUR
N (to the Imp): Come on! You slowpoke! Hurry up! Don’t be so slow!
F: I see daylight! Come on! Hurry up!
FRAME FIVE
N: We’ll hunt up the princess now, eh? And go back to the palace!
F: Yes! There’s the door to this befuddle place yonder!
FRAME SIX
I: Pug ug umble guck!
N (losing cap): I’m so glad we are going to get out of here!
F: I told you I’d find the way out, did I not, eh?
FRAME SEVEN
N: Yes! You did not! We are as bad off as ever!
F: Huh! This beats me! I’m certainly, um, twisted! the only thing we can do is go back again!
FRAME EIGHT
N: (having fallen out of bed and awakened): Huh! I was wondering why everything looked so sidewise like!
—
Every single installment of Little Nemo in Slumberland ends with Nemo awakening on the floor in a smaller frame. There is a wonderful sequence which starts with him in bed, and the bed grows legs and gallops over the city wildly until he awakens, having fallen out of bed.
The strip Rob found has an original publication date of 1908, and is drawn from a several-weeks sequence known as “Befuddle Hall.”
There was a very terrible animated film adaptation of the strip made in the 1990s. In the US in the seventies, a wonderful animated campaign for Levis’ pants made heavy and direct use of imagery and sequences originating in the strips, but wildly psychedelicized in the nineteen-seventies idiom.
Performing a google image search on the quoted term “little nemo” seems to yield a number of scans of the strip in color, as it was originally published. The strip was an anchor of the American sunday comics supplement and original rotgoravured pages are sought-after collectibles (I have never seen one in real life).
Anyway, there’s a ton of stuff out there of Nemo and on McCay. If you can find it, “Little Nemo 1905-1914” may contain every strip from the greatest period. This edition was published by the Evergreen Press (a subthing of Taschen), has an introductioun by Bill Blackbeard, and the ISBN is 3-8228-6300-9.
Rob also blogged our correspondence, upon which this post is based.
The Weave
My ol’ buddy and housemate Bill Weaver emailed me a link to his 2004 pictures, in which i learned, variously:
1. My hometown still produces seasonal events of heartbreaking beauty and quaint silliness, such as the leaf change and the municipal bluegrass festival band names.
2. Bill visited an incredible residence belonging to some wealthy person.
3. WFHB still exists (but I knew that already).
5. One of the churches I attended as a child now has a new cupola over the nave crossing, probably an interim to a steeple originally planned when the church was built in the early nineteen-hundreds (There’s supposed to gbe a ghost, but never saw one).
Whether Bill knows that his annual photo updates are a kindness to me personally or not, I do not know. But they most assuredly are.
Pot, meet kettle
On the bus ride home, my AvantGo feed of Wired News presented me with this astonishing information.
Apparently,
TOKYO — Your eyes probably hurt just thinking about it: Tens of thousands of Japanese cell-phone owners are poring over full-length novels on their tiny screens.
In this technology-enamored nation, the mobile phone has become so widespread as an entertainment and communication device that reading e-mail, news headlines and weather forecasts — rather advanced mobile features by global standards — is routine.
Now, Japan’s cell-phone users are turning pages.
Several mobile websites offer hundreds of novels — classics, best sellers and some works written especially for the medium.
Once again, I find myself living in the future of the future. Really, it’s not at all what I had planned. I had a hovel in the country all picked out, replete with peeling lath walls and choked with charcoal dust, tracked with crushed pastels and aromatic with turpentine and linseed oil. Oh well; this only adds to my conviction that personal desire is a thing of absolute irrelevance.
Returning to the topic at hand from such – ah – pastoral reflections, I am becoming aware of the odd limitations that the Palm OS and associated apps enforce upon users. In this case, my immediate reaction to seeing the story, of course, was to blog it.
But how? AvantGo provides no direct URLs in the story feeds. I could copy it to the clipboard, paste it into mo:blog, thumb out a few words, and save it to sync when I got home – or even upload remotely as I did yesterday.
But how in the world could I get a screenshot of the eye-popper that prompted the entry? Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have some longer-form thoughts on the general topic of this rather absurd mountain-climbing I’m engaged in. As I have remarked, I had literally no idea what I was getting in to. I thought this whole thing was a done deal and I was walking down some well-trod path, one that preferably passed though a bucolic countryside and ended in a garden cottage.
Reasons
Bryan explains why he’s easing over to Firefox from Safari. I have been more or less doing this myself, although I haven’t loaded FF up with plugins.
What I would really like is bookmark sync between the browsers.
Also, come to think of it, Safari’s bookmark manager implementation is waaaay slicker than Firefox’s; also the default text-entry form display in Firefox is 12-pt Courier, which really sucks if you are entering lots of HTML in fixed-width form boxes. I also miss Safari’s excellent in-text-area interactive spellchecker.
Feedapalooza
Feedpalooza Journal documents Carlo Zottman’s bootleg RSS scraper, Feedapalooza. Ooh! He’s got the NME!
RSScraper
RSSscraper: “RSSscraper generates RSS feeds from websites who do not provide it themselves.”
once burned
Jay Allen mentions some new anti-spam plugins, and while I’m not going to run out and set them up (given that I busted the comments on a bunch of blogs real good last time I did that), all three sound pretty interesting. I would love to reimplement trackback, but until moderation is avaialable, it’s gotta wait.
The combination of preview->post->moderation on this blog has, as best I can recall, zeroed out my spam; unfortunately, it’s also killed conversation in the comments. When a post picks up a bunch of commentary, I may not get to approve the comments until the end of the day, and so the remarks overlap and do not take into account my replies.
Which is a shame. I may experimentally disable MT-B’s moderation to see if the dual-layer asbestos underwear is enough.
The thought strikes that MT-4 should really have something like a dedicated spam-fighting plugin layer or protocol so that developers like Jay and Chad (who wrote the multi-step comment submission filter and the MT-Moderate filter which does enable trackback moderation) can make their products work together with maximal handshakery.
newsmob
NewsMob looks worth a look.
Shut down
Safely shut down the Internet at the press of a button.