More Beckett!

Well, I was thinking of going all ''low-brow'' today (!), but then my friend Jimmy (on the left with the ukulele) came up with these two ideas, continuing the Beckettian theme of the last post, and it must be added, further limiting the people who will find this funny. So these two are dedicated to all you weightlifting philosophy cartoon fans out there! For everyone else look here! Jimmy seems to think the second one was particularly funny, it being a reference to a Beckett quotation from Waiting for Godot again. I don't know how famous it is, nor how funny it is, but Jimmy insisted. And you can see from the photo that he's a dangerous man.

Let me know your thoughts anyway!

See you Thursday,

becca xo

Waiting for Blobbot

Here's the new idea i've been working on, based on Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, and in a equally significant sense, based on Sesame Street's re-telling of it 'Waiting for Elmo'. When I say based, I do mean copied from the script, although careful readers will notice that one frame deviates from the original!

As much as cookie monster might wish to say the play makes no sense at all (see link above), and having over-heard numerous dismissals during the interval when I went to see it in Brighton (parallels with X-men anyone?), I really really like Beckett, and what seems to me to be interesting about all of his plays is not that it makes no sense, but that they make too much sense: they have too many different meanings. It'd take me a long time and a lot of thought to explain how I don't mean this in a post-modern way: I think the plays actively resist some interpretations (an interesting point re: this is the wikipedia article about how fiercely opposed Beckett was to female actors in this particular play). What interests me the most is that even this play, which is easy to imagine as existing in some sort of vacuum, is in fact situated on the margins of a society: while this society is absent on stage, there are still numerous references to sleeping in ditches, a mob which beat up Estragon, the role of artists, etc. I suppose my intuition is that this is a play that critiques our society as it is now, not just 'ideas' or 'metaphors'. I think it's a materialist play about negotiating the contradictions of a post-industrialised society.

Anyway, it might just be that I've been listening to too much of the Diagram Brothers so I'll just shut up: if you're interested, watch this bit from the play: I find it incredibly moving. Alternatively, send me essays and things to prove me wrong, in either case,

Smash the System!

beccaxo

p.s Being & Tim has its first celebrity endorsement, more to follow! xx

Super Kant: Part 2

I've been working hard on some new ideas, but as yet they're not quite finished, so instead I'm going to put up this  (very) old but (I think) fairly amusing Super Kant episode! You may remember 'mild-mannered philosopher Clark Kant' from this episode but in this second installment we find him battling with the moral conundrum of whether or not to tell a murderer where their victim is hiding. Kant was so committed to the idea of respecting another rational agent that he did in fact suggest that the moral thing would be not to lie to the murderer. Presumably you'd then phone the police or something. As Being says, most people tend to be a little baffled by this example, and it certainly goes some of the way for giving Kant his 'hard-nosed' image. That and the front cover of the Critique of Pure Reason, he looks terrifying! (For more on this example have a look at the 'Inquiring Murderer' section on wikipedia.)

While we're talking about Kant's hard-nosed image, have a look at this video. It made me chuckle, but then again, I'm a Nietzschean.

See you on Thursday!

beccaxo

The Death of the Author

Hello there! Happy Thursday! While I was looking for something to put up I found this super super old one, as you can see from the date. Over 4 years old, crikey! (For a long time I didn't know how to work photoshop, so i spent a couple of years just copying out the same 6 cartoons over and over again, trying to get them ABSOLUTELY perfect! Thank goodness for the clone stamp!). Anyway, like all Being & Tims, it's a not-very-sophisticated literalisation of a philosophical point: here the point in question is Roland Barthe's seminal essay 'The Death of the Author', where he suggests that imposing authorial intention as the source of the meaning of a text ignores the fact that texts can be interpreted in numerous different ways. A good example is whether or not Conrad's Heart of Darkness is racist: if you're the interested the Chinua Achebe argument is the most famous in this discussion. The notion of the death of the author then sort of leads to Derrida and post-structuralism and a 'flux between interpretations'. People are beginning to question whether this is a particularly honest approach to literature or life (while Derrida isn't wrong it's not clear that we don't always already operate under certain assumptions which post-structuralism doesn't touch.) Being & Tim certainly think so!

I've also started an Etsy Shop for those of you who might want to buy a set of Being & Tim comics, they're not expensive, I just thought I'd put my fear of the internet on one side and give it a go. So if you want one or two or many, then go HERE!

Ta ta for now! Becca xo 

The Elephant of SURPRISE!

I thought I should make this rather silly joke after the elephant of truth, but as it is, it's still not really more than a very silly pun. I tried to make it a bit more sophisticated with reference to Henry David Thoreau, so if you like the idea of him and Ralph Waldo Emerson having sexy parties at Walden pond then you can just ignore the elephant fellow. (The reference is from Walden, p31 in my edition which is Dover, 1995.) The guy basically spent a year squatting by a pond, being totally self-sufficient, and writing about the need to re-think our relationship to society. Really excellent Anarchist stuff.

beccaxo

The Elephant of Truth

Hello there, me again! Here's another Being & Tim for you, it's fairly self-explanatory this time, though it has some basic principles of logic that I could just about scrabble together from my recollections of the first year of uni!

Also here's another character i've been working on: it's just a pencil sketch so sorry about the quality, but i thought it would be good to get more used to sharing my sketches so I post more. It's a character who's semi-autobiographical: she's a depressive by day, and by night she is SUPER-DEPRESSIVE! With all the energy and powers of a normal person! She's friends with Data-Entry Pig, from the other day....

beccaxo