Yeah, I know you could just print them off yourselves, but then again, how would you get your hands on the EXCLUSIVE Being & Tim Stickers that are in this pack?! That would take a LOT more planning, and at £1 a pack plus P & P it's a lot simpler just to order them straight from my email address: rasdyer@gmail.com. I could also send you Being & Tim 1 and 2 for £1 each too, as they all make great stocking fillers!
For those of you still waiting on diaries, I have nearly completed the final formatting, and will let you know as soon as they are ready for me to send,
And while we're on the subject of technology, check out this website that my brother and dad are setting up: www.carebook-dev.org.The idea is that it's a support network for patients and carers, as well as providing information and medical advice. Like Facebook, for cancer!
becca xo
(P.S Geeky favourite thing about this cartoon: Kierkegaard is on facebook chat as idle, because of what he says about idleness!! ;-) )
I got back from Sweden & Dragonfly festival yesterday morning at about 6am, but thought I'd wait until after a long sleep to update the blog! (Didn't want to drool on the keyboard for one thing!)
The festival was great, set in a forest near Falköping, what I didn't realise was that the forest is home to a reconstruction of a pre-historic village! So Being & Tim were exhibited, and I was sleeping in, an actual hut. (Although I like to think of it more as a hobbit hole.)
Outside the hobbit hole!
Inside the hut (Being & Tim on your right!)
Oh, before I go rabbiting on, here's the actual cartoon for today. Being-not-at-home. It's a Heideggerean term (again) about feeling das unheimlich: out of place in the world (literally 'not-at-home'). Part of Dasein's authenticity is its ability to recognise its displacement from the objective world, its own particularity and individuality...I'm sure a Heideggerean could explain better than that. Actually, does Heidegger actually use that word or am I getting him confused with Freud? Gosh I really should read Being & Time...
Anyway, Being's using the term to try and avoid Heidegger. What larks!
Part of the point of not posting while I was away was to catch up with some new cartoons. Unfortunately Ryanair's baggage policy (one lunchbox each) made it impossible to take my big sketchbook so I spent a lot of time just doodling really, plus being inspired by one of my fellow artists at the festivals, the lovely Emma. You can see her work at www.emmaekstam.com, it really is amazing. It's inspired me to start drawing things again, (I put a picture of my hands here for comedy value!), plus we talked about doing some illustrations together of Thus Spoke Zarasthustra. It's a pretty Romantic book (well I'd say it was satirical more than Romantic, but let's not split hairs right now) but the point is that all the references to dancing stars and tightrope walkers and hurdy gurdy songs would lend itself well to illustration. Y'know, spreading the word through imagery, like stained-glass windows! haha. Anyway, I'm going to try and put some more sketches up on here, to develop my style abit. But tell me if you just want more Being & Tim! (I don't really know the etiquette of blogs, can I change subjects a bit? Is that a betrayal?!)
Anyway, here are some more photos, in case you're interested. You can also see an animation I made at the festival on my youtube account. It's about my bandmates Jimmy & El, who in many ways are similar to Being & Tim!
A proper fairy tale mushroom (there's a pixie under there if you look hard enough)
Anyway, I'll update tomorrow, just to make up for the lack of posts over the holiday. (I'll also forgive you for not voting on my poll. haha)
becca xo
another hut
susanna gets her prehistoric skills on, cooking on an open fire!
a viking boat at the Gothenburg City Museum
Gothenburg
Susanna & Sara dancing in the Main Tent at Dragonfly
Well, I'm gonna come clean. I've not done a Being & Tim for today. I've been super-busy working on a poster/flyer thing for my friend's organisation compARTment (see left). They work to use derelict sites for workshops and community events and brilliant stuff like that. Anywayses, they've got some stalls at our local market, and said I could do a zinefest there if I made a poster. I kinda like it, and I definitely enjoy geeking out on photoshop! (the words are gonna go in the blue bit, I don't know what they are yet!)
But, just so you're not entirely bereft of some bad philosophy puns and toilet humour, I've also included a couple of very old sketches of Being & Tim, back when I was still working out how to draw them. They'll probably never make it into final pieces. But you never know, I've got to run out of ideas at some point!The second one's for all the Cavellians in the house....good old Stan :-)
(although for the record, his reading of Nietzsche in Cities of Words is appalling. E-mail if you wanna discuss...!)
Anyway I'll do my best to do a proper one for Monday, have a good weekend in the meantime!
oh dear. Not only did I miss our appointment last thursday, but once again I've left this late so I have had neither time to properly clean it up, nor to think of anything interesting to say, and as such, Being in particular looks a mess. Although in my defence, I was 'experimenting with a new style'....y'know, messy!
Anyway, the joke here is about confusing the relative with the absolute, but this is a silly philosophy pun, so instead I will talk about Apophatic Theology, in order to use long words and feel clever. Ready? Apophatic theology is a posh name for Negative Theology, that wot I mentioned in my last post, the idea that God is so awesome and infinite that language can't describe him, we just have to say what he's not like, in a gesture towards him. Sort of like saying, 'oh our language is so rubbish, but there is this thing beyond it that is not rubbish.' That's a direct from Julian of Norwich that is.
Also behold how I have put the three sections in three different parts! This is to build DRAMATIC TENSION, and not because it's too fiddly to put them altogether on photoshop...!!!! Let me know if you think it works, see you on thursday! becca xo
Hello there. Here's my post for this Monday, at a much more reasonable time than last week! I saw this video at the gym the other day. Apparently it's from 2008 but I hadn't heard it before although it is said to have 'taken the world by storm' or got 22 MILLION hits on youtube, which I guess is about the same thing. And yet, as so often happens in popular culture, the lyrics contain a ridiculous use of the word 'infinity.' (See the cartoon). Another example is in cult-classic movie Forbidden Planet, where the oh-so-super-intelligent scientist claims that the aliens managed to increase their energy supply: 'almost literally to the the power of infinity'. This latter example is made even more amusing by the use of the word 'almost' at the beginning!
Now I don't want to come across as a snob, if anything I'm just a pedant, but the philosophical and mathematical point of the term infinity is that it represents that which is beyond what we can describe or calculate, and as this can't have a conceivable upper limit then infinity cannot be said to be fixed point or a quantity! Rather it's a quality: so you can't multiply by the power of infinity anymore than you can multiply by the power of blue. Also the question of how we can know that infinity really exists when it is precisely that which exceeds and resists knowledge is a question that has been pondered by many philosophers and theologians. I don't think any of these thinkers thought that the answer might be 'Guru Josh'...
Now I suppose Guru Josh is being a bit more ''poetic'' than the writers of Forbidden Planet, but nonetheless
this sort of hippy mumbo-jumbo just serves to distract from how exciting the notion of the Infinite is, whether in astronomy or the Negative Theologians for example: Pseudo-Dionysus, Rudolf Otto, Paul Tillich, and then in all the philosophers influenced by the latter, including Heidegger. Gordon Finlayson, a lecturer at my old uni thinks we can even find a type of Negative Theology in Adorno. He presents a persuasive argument in 'On not Being Silent in the Darkness: Adorno's Singular Apophaticism' Adorno and Religion, ed. M. Waggoner, Indiana University Presss (forthcoming 2009). (Check me out with my 'proper' citations and everything!)
Hum. This post started off as a joke but I got a bit serious at the end there...In any case infinity is a serious issue, and cartoons like this need to be seen as the pathetic attempt for easy laughs that they are....
Join me in my quest for linguistic precision in popular culture!
Right then. Well it's still technically thursday in the UK (16 minutes to go as I type!) and, as promised, here's another cartoon. I am too tired to write much, as I spent all evening photo-shopping Heidegger's face. He looks a bit camp, but then he seems to be a bit of a camp icon in this comic, as you may have guessed from the video I made back in March.
In a nutshell, Heidegger's project was precisely to give priority to the question of Being, i.e to explore what it means to actually be, the categories this involves and such. He explores this in Being & Time, the book that started this comic off in the first place! Hence Being's outrage....!
It's worth getting a closer look so you can peer deep into Heidegger's dark photo-shopped pupils, and try to see the ground of Being...
beccaxo
(finished at 23.53- a close call!)
well, it's not a monday, but i have been doing a few little sketches, and got over-excited by my extra-curricular work and thought i'd show you, dearest internet users.
so over <-----there is a sketch of The Cat in the hat, which i will alter for copyright purposes in my upcoming Being & Tim 'Schrodinger's Cat in the Hat'! For those of you who follow my Twitter account, this is the quantum mechanics i've been attempting to get my head around! And it's trying to get it to rhyme which is the real kicker...still, keep you eyes on this page, I reckon it'll be ready sooooonish. Go here if you wish to prepare yourself!
And here ----> is another cartoon sketch of the two characters I hope you are familiar with now, Data Entry Pig and Becca Bumface. (They're going to get their own blog soon, called 'Friends on Benefits', one of those ''social satires'' of the world of work and the benefit system. Ho ho) Here Becca Bumface is attempting to simplify Nietzsche's notion of the Apollonian/Dionysiac. (That's the Birth Of Tragedy in front of her there...!) You can read more about this here, and make your own decision if Art Garfunkel really does represent the orgiastic and ecstatic elements of the Dionysian. So, just another sketch really, for my own amusement...and to mock my friend who said it...!
I was gonna say ' a bit of a silly one today', but then I realised that, well, that's not really something particularly notable! But yeah, here's Being asking some questions of himself, in a philosophical way. We've got references to some of the most important names of the philosophical realm. Plato, Hegel, Heraclitus, Flowers.
You may remember the cartoons on the left from this post and this post, here they are recounting my meeting with Being & Tim's first celebrity fan! NICK CAVE! Well, that's not really what happened at all, I did actually speak (or mumble) to him and then shoved my Being & Tim comic into his hand and ran away before he could say anything! He met my friend more recently, and said that Being & Tim was 'very moving'.
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.
When my dad was about the age he is in this picture, he did a test where he was asked to fill in the sentence 'G___ M___ think alike'. As you might have guessed, he thought that the answer was grey mice, which I've always thought really cute, and have finally got round to illustrating. He probably didn't imagine that they were talking about Derrida, but I thought it was funnier that way...Oh, and I'm also working on some ideas for new non-philosophical comics, so if you like inappropriate humour about illness and/or social satire featuring pigs in ruffs, then stay tuned! Happy Secular Chocolate-Scoffing Weekend! beccaxo
In 'How to bluff your way in Philosophy' Jim Hankinson describes the main characteristics of Eastern Philosophy in a section called 'How to Be a Mystic':
'1/ Invent a few meaningless paradoxes (such as 'The only true light is the darkness' or 'Each step forward is a step backwards').
2/. Have a line in pointless proverbs (like 'He who talks with the goldfish is lucky to receive an answer', or 'the taller the tree, the thinner the fruit').
3/ Profess a belief in at least one palpable metaphysical absurdity, such as that Everything is All One, or that Ordinary Reality is merely a Base Illusion in Comparison with the True Light of the Godhead. Remember to Talk in Capital Letters.
4/ Intimate in an obscure way that the Road to Enlightenment, though Long and Hard, is Ultimately Traversable, and hint that a good method of traversing it is by entering on a Close Physical Relationship with yourself.
5/ At all times wear a Benign Smile, for practical purposes indistinguishable from the Inane Grin' (1999:56)
In my experience, (and famously in that of Monty Python's) Philosophers tend to be just as good at partying as they are at thinking. And what would a party be without a good game of Twister!! And look at John Locke cheating by trying to invoke secondary qualities! What a cad! beccaxo
The next lot of Being & Tim cartoons have been photo-copied and enveloped for your enjoyment. This collection includes 6 Being & Tim cartoons inspired by the work of Martin Heidegger (left) (including Being-in-the-world, Tool-Being, Ready-to-hand, Naked Dasein, Being with a Big B, and Not-at-home). They're a great summary of the main themes of Being & Time! ;-) 
