My dad is in the course of writing a book about democratic organizations. Here are a few of his random holiday musings:

a) Always front-load your agenda with the important stuff. People have only so much focus & energy; they are freshest at the outset. Meetings degenerate, wander, get bogged down.

b) In meetings, people will repeat themselves over and over. They take disagreement as a failure to be understood. 'If they can just explain themselves... everyone will agree.' Don't let this happen.

c) Many disagreements are merely over ego & personal relationships rather than the actual matters at hand. Cut this to a minimum if no other reason than that ego-based struggles are boring.

Figured out how to post from my phone. Love it! We'll see if I end up posting more now.

Greatest phone discovery lately is that your can text google (ie. 466453) and get google results easily, ie. 'sushi nyc' or 'oyster depot sf'. Yes, this is pretty basic. I'm way out of the loop. But I've had a cell phone for less than a year.

David B., Epileptic, Page 152 Detail
The text reads 'I was hoping for something extraordinary, not this stupid make-believe. What I wanted to do was talk with Hell.'

Osamu Tezuka, Life Of Buddha, Vol.7, Page 19
The text reads, 'Do you remember this, Buddha?' 'As if I saw it yesterday.'
The question is, who is that retrieving the chest of jewels from the pool? It looks clearly like a woman. I like the exact moments chosen for the illustrations, two of them silent. First, the wordless ecstacy of accomplishment. Then, the chest itself. It is the moment (of anticipation) before it is reopened: does it still contain the jewels? Lastly, the king presents the chest (still unopened) to the Buddha, recalling the moment when it was set aside.

It is common for graphics programmers to find that images produced by buggy code are surprisingly beautiful. Accidental beauty touches upon many fascinating topics, ie. the role of chance in creativity. I believe accidental beauty is a elemental part of Wabi-Sabi in Japanese aesthetics.

I've been working on translating the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu. I don't speak ancient Chinese. My method is to read 10-12 versions in parallel, chapter-by-chapter and then try to put the text in my own words.

This process is rewarding - and to me made neccesary - by the fact that translations of the Tao vary so widely in interpretation.

Reading different translations in parallel is like finding the accidental beauty of doing graphics programming. The variations are at once mistakes, new perspectives, and wholly original creations.

Whether or not they are faithful to the original text is one matter. Regardless, the differences between them shed light.

Here is one variation I came across today in Witter Bynner's version of Chapter 62: 'Only pursue an offender to show him the way.' Bynner's translation is very free. I think this interpretation is unfaithful to the original. But it is pretty neat. It reads to me like an interesting movie pitch, for some kind of inverted 'Les Miserables.'

Incidentally, if I had to recommend one translationn, it would be Ursula K. Le Guin's version. It is pretty, faithful in spirit, modern and insightful. I've never really liked her science fiction and fantasy, except The Left Hand of Darkness.

Which brings me back to Scott McCloud. He works in fiction, but I prefer his non-fiction. His theoretical books on comics medium, Understanding Comics and Making Comics, are widely recognized masterpieces of form and content. But his own fictional works are pretty uninspiring to me. My impression is that they don't have a very large audience. Why?

I was reading one of his online comics, Zot! Online: "Hearts and Minds", when I had an aha! moment. The storytelling was weak (sorry) - it read like one of his throwaway stories used to illustrate a point in his theoretical works. But even worse, the illustration was simply inferior (sorry again). My insight came when I realized that the same style of illustration worked perfectly in his theoretical works.

Here is an author who has raised fascinating questions about how words and pictures work together. Specifically, he has theorized that one of the trademarks of Manga - cartoony figures & detailed, realistic backgrounds - works to maximize reader empathy. He calls this the "masking effect."

Well, isn't there something similar going on in his own books? That is, his cartoony, diagrammatic drawing style works to convey his ideas rather draw attention to themselves. More realistic or pretty drawings would become specific, acquire a life of their own. It has been famously said of Nancy's Ernie Bushmiller that he 'didn't draw a tree, he drew THE tree.' Ie. he drew some kind of Platonic Ideal of a Tree.

In software engineering, we would speak the "class" as opposed to the "instance."

In non-fiction, when we are inherently dealing with ideas, generalities, or abstractions, the corresponding visual style is diagrammatic. Other non-fiction visual mediums such as "the Owner's manual" understand this. But I can't think of too many non-fiction comics that get this.

Obviously, I'm not talking about something like Joe Sacco. Journalism is about the specific. In fact, as a journalist I think Joe Sacco has a different problem - to avoid being any more specific than what is factual and documented.

Okay, I just realized why I can't think of any: there aren't any non-fiction comics that deal in abstract ideas. They're usually biography/memoir and occasionally history or journalism. That's interesting.