He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

–A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic pose?

–Excerpted from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Continue reading »

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Comic writer and artist Neil Cameron is creating alphabetically themed image as suggested by fans on Facebook and Twitter.

Pictured here is “I is for… Indiana Jones Inching Away from an Inebriated Iron Man“. (Kinda reminds me of Bender…)

Highlights include “D is for… Doctor Who Defeating Doctor Doom in a Deadly Disco Dance-off” , “J is for… Just Joss” for its kitch factor (and creep factor!) and “F is for…the Fantastic Four saving the Finnish Ambassador from Fred Flintstone, who’s Flinging Flaming Fajitas at his Ford Fiesta” for its awesomely out of hand title.

The project was announced June 11th, with the first image appearing on the 14th and is still going on.

As of this writing Cameron’s on Q, which is “Q is for… Q and Q reading Q” with a nifty infinite regression thing going on.

Check it out in its entireity on Neil’s blog. It is indeed pretty awesome.

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Even where none of the parts of a good whole are bad, or a bad whole good, it often happens that the value of a complex whole cannot be measured by adding together the value of its parts; the whole is often better or worse than the sum of the value of its parts. In all aesthetic pleasures, for example, it is important that the object admired should really be beautiful: in the admiration of what is ugly there is something ridiculous, or even sometimes repulsive, although, apart from the object there may be no difference in the value of the emotion per se.

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