Sammy Harkham (Poor Sailor, Crickets, editor of Kramer’s Ergot) has created a gold mine of good work, and I mean that almost literally ’cause it seems like I really gotta’ dig to find this shit. I hate ordering stuff online, but it looks like that’s what it’s going to come down to to get his books. The stories are pretty simple for the most part, elegantly told and just downright fun to read. You almost get a children’s book sort of feel from his work. I rarely have aspirations to make comics anymore (I just wanna’ illustrate junk), but Harkham is way inspiring and my mind wanders to old comic ideas a little every time I stumble across something of his. Here’s a little more:

I finished Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell today. Bleak stuff, but I’m addicted to that shit. It kind of shined a little light on where the dadaist & surrealist movements got so much inspiration, which was nice. I hate feeling like these amazing movements are just a whip crack out of nowhere and I’m not in the right place or time period. After I finished I had an urge to go back and read some of the Alfred Jarry stuff that I was so obsessed with back in ‘06. Too bad I left those books in Texas.

Wikipedia tells me that Henry Miller once attempted to translate Rimbaud’s work, which reminds me that I want to pick up this:

I figure if Miller has something good to say about it it’ll be hard to go wrong.

Unrelated to things that inspire me to create (well maybe not totally unrelated), more or less on a sad note- Keiko will probably have to go back to Japan in a couple of months. Could somebody just tackle me and crush my heart with a big mallet please? This sucks.

Images-
First 3, Sammy Harkham’s work.
4th, Henry Miller’s book on books (if you couldn’t tell).
5th, some goofy picture I found while looking for old photos of Arthur Rimbaud.
6th, Duchamps ‘Fountain.’
7th & 8th, my feet and Keiko’s feet and Keiko’s hands.

All right. Everyone have fun. Needles @ The Eagle on the 4th, okay?