This photo, taken 32 years ago today, is what I see each time I open my wallet.

I look forward to seeing what our next 32 years together will bring!

I woke in the middle of the night from a dream in which I was one of four young boys in an urban environment helping someone move.

We were loading boxes into a moving van, and at one point the owner drove his car up a ramp at the rear and on into the van. When he came back outside and began folding up the ramp, it slipped, and ended up hitting him in the head multiple times. There was blood everywhere.

At this point, I suddenly realized, like one of those characters in novels who suddenly become aware that they’re in a novel, that I was one of the four kids from The Wire—only I had no idea which one I was.

I knew, though, that my odds of success in life or even of just survival weren’t very good, so I struggled to figure out my identity. Was I Michael, or Dukie, or … ?

Then I was awake. I was extremely unsettled, and it took me awhile to fall back to sleep, which is unusual for me.

The amazing Dial B for Blog has just posted an extensive tribute to Gaspar Saladino, the man responsible for some of the best logos, cover lettering, and advertising in comic books.

At DC Comics, he designed the logos for Swamp Thing, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and more, while over at Marvel he did the same for The Avengers, Captain America, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, and others.

Even those whose interests run more to science fiction than to comics might still be interested in what the site calls “The Gaspar SCI-FI Cloud,” which plucks distinctive lettering from a variety of science-fictional covers to form a tag cloud of sorts.

Click here to go to the first part of the 12-part series.

One night this week, I heard a neighbor setting off fireworks, and so I walked out into the darkness and down the road to peer into the valley to catch a free show. I watched until the mosquitoes wore me down, and then headed home, not using my flashlight, because I hoped to catch a glimpse of the glowworm which Irene and I had discovered a couple of summers back. We’d been amazed to finally see one in reality after knowing them only from a lifetime of hearing that song, and I hoped to duplicate the sight, but even though we’d caught glimpses of it multiple occasions that summer, we didn’t see it again last summer, and haven’t seen it so far this summer.

As I stepped off the road and onto our driveway, flashlight still off, I caught a glimpse something circular to one side, something which I at first interpreted as having to be a metallic object reflecting the lights from my house. But as I studied it, I realized that this was no reflection. Something was actually glowing!

I could make out a bright, ragged circle a foot in diameter, with other further random bits and pieces of glowing material heading off a dozen feet or so into the woods. The night was so dark that I couldn’t make out exactly what was glowing, so I turned on my flashlight. I was surprised to see that all that was present was wood. (more…)

Yesterday, while heading home from a visit to the New York offices of the SCI FI Channel at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, I happened to pass the International Center of Photography. I’d often walked by the building before, since my Dad used to work at McGraw-Hill, which was just a few blocks further up the Avenue of the Americas, but I’d never been moved to visit.

But this time, I noticed that one of the current exhibitions was Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan, and since Irene and I had visited Japan last year, I was intrigued. So I took a later train home than I might have and instead toured the museum.

There were many interesting images on display, but the ones that interested me the most were by Tomoko Sawada. Check out the photograph below, from her series “School Days.”

There’s something hypnotizing about the image, but until I read the descriptive materials, I didn’t realize what made the picture so unusual. This particular aspect of the photo was perhaps affecting on me on a subconscious level.

Can you—without rushing off to Google the answer—figure out what I’m talking about?

I dreamt this morning that I was in large room which resembled a convention dealers room, but wasn’t. It’s really just a hotel ballroom filled with many rectangular tables. The part of the the room in which I’m sitting is quiet, but about a quarter of the room is separated from me by a low wall, and it sounds rowdy over there. A wild and crazy party seems to be going on, with laughter, loud music, drinking, dancing, and even a few fist fights. (Because, after all, what really good party doesn’t have at least a couple of those?)

Suddenly, Edward James Olmos walks up to me—or should I say, Admiral William Adama, because he’s in full Battlestar Galactica garb. He tells me that he’s tired of his people making that ruckus. He tells me that I have to shut the party down. He tells me that I have to pull the plug.

I stand on a chair and look over that wall, and there indeed is the crew of Battlestar Galactica, not the actors, but the characters, in their appropriate costumes and uniforms, whooping it up. I obey Adama. I shout out an announcement.

“Until the crew learns to behave,” I say, “there will be no electricity until further notice.”

I step down off the chair and pull a plug from a socket in the wall, killing the power. Suddenly, all is silence. When I turn around, Adama is gone, and so I sit down behind a table, and return to reading the comic book I’d been engrossed in when he’d arrived. I look at the credits on the splash page, and discover that it was written by director Agnès Varda.

Which, once I wake, actually seems to me to be the strangest part of the dream. I’d kill to read a comic book by Agnès Varda!

As I’ve shared earlier, my high-school friend Donna Grant has managed to mold herself into a successful novelist, along with her friend and collaborator Virginia DeBerry.

The August 25th issue of Publishers Weekly stunned me today with news of just how successful she truly is by including details of the deal her agent just closed for the team:

At Touchstone, Sulay Hernandez secured world rights to a new novel by Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant, Uptown, with a six-figure offer to [agent Victoria] Sanders. This saga will explore New York City’s black aristocracy through the story of an institutionally and politically entrenched Harlem family whose interests in valuable real estate holdings provoke resentment and in-fighting. DeBerry and Grant, who switched to Touchstone for Gotta Keep On Tryin’, published earlier this year, have another novel, What Doesn’t Kill You, coming from the publisher in January 2009.

Congratulations, ladies!

Comic-book artist Michael Kaluta, perhaps best known for his work on The Shadow, turns 61 today. Kaluta is also known for forming—along with Jeff Jones, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Bernie Wrightson—an artistic collective called The Studio in the late ’70s.

In 1971, Kaluta won the Shazam Award, given by the Academy of Comic Book Arts, for Outstanding New Talent, and the following year, at Phil Seuling’s July 4th, 1972 weekend comic-book convention, he drew the image you see above right for an annoying kid named Scott Edelman who’d thrust his sketchpad at him.

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In my dream, it’s early morning, and I’m wandering a small cruise ship similar to the one Irene and I took to the Galapagos in 2001 and Antarctica in 2005. It doesn’t seem as if anyone else is awake as I head to the dining area in search of breakfast, but when I get there, Ajay and Edna Budrys are already seated. They’re the only ones there.

It doesn’t bother me that Ajay is dead in the real world. Actually, I’m not even aware of it in the dream, and so chat with them nonchalantly about what’s available for breakfast, and the places we’ll be touring that day. Places which, now that I’m awake, I can no longer remember.

I don’t usually eat an elaborate breakfast, maybe only a bagel or croissant, but I have trouble finding one. The tables are filled with food completely inappropriate for breakfast—hot dogs in buns, marbled cakes with mounds of frosting, thing like that. Finally, after much searching, I do find a bagel, and return to the table to talk with Ajay and Edna.

As I sit, in comes Susan Casper. Gardner Dozois isn’t awake yet, and so it’s just the four of us for awhile. We get to talking about reviews of Ajay’s books, and Susan mentions a particularly devastating one, and how she wanted to contact that critic, whom she knew personally, to see what was up with his undeserved slam.

Bells ring, telling us that the first boat is going ashore. I want to be on it, to see the sights in the early morning light, when fewer people are up and about. Then I slowly come awake, still with no idea what sort of place we’ll be touring that day, but eager to see it anyway.

I just ran across a blog entry made by Scott Kurtz, writer and artist of the long-running Webcomic PvP, and author of the book How to Make Webcomics. His words so mirrored the sentiments expressed in the Beckett quote I’ve used for the title and subhead of this blog (as seen above) that I felt compelled to share them with you.

He wrote:

All of the progress I’ve made in my work, be it writing or art, was accomplished through getting it wrong the first time. My father always told me that the first brush stroke will never be perfect. There’s only so much you can learn from reading books on writing or art theory. You have to create and get your hands dirty and see what works. You have to take risks and you have to fail.