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From memory, he's given up on 'History of Humour' - there was a great, long interview with Campbell in the Comics Journal round the end of last year, which is what had me hanging out for 'Fate of the Artist' all this time, when he says as much. 'After the Snooter' really was great, wasn't it? I have to say, too, that, as an Australian, I really like some of the humour in Campbell's work that springs from his semi-outsider's view of Australia. I'm not sure how many other Australians there are here at ILC, but do you agree?
― James Morrison (JRSM), Monday, 29 May 2006 02:03 (seventeen years ago) link
Just me and Møllygrubber I think (H-yley's guest appearances being this-thread-exclusive), and he hasn't read the later suburban Alec/Eddie stuff. I think you're probably off the money, though - there's a bit of an outside-looking-in feel to some of the earlier work like Little Italy, or the odd piece in The Dance Of Lifey Death, but these are mostly where it's Eddie retelling a story or a bit of folklore he's been told. The narrator-as-observer feel of After The Snooter, though, doesn't seem to be from an appreciably more alien position than the narrator in King Canute Crowd - it's all just Campbell looking at the world and the people around him and thinking "this is something 'other', how do I present it?", where the norm is not a culture but the inside of his head.
One difference between this approach in the two books, though, is that he's a lot more comfortable, by Snooter, with the world in his head being what he's largely interested in. The young man of Canute is somewhat awed by the social facility of the slightly older group he's observing, and deliberately sets out to romanticise them in his writing because of this. The middle-aged father of Snooter has been out of the factory for almost twenty years, and has been making actual money for making up stuff or thinking about himself for about a decade - but he's also just grown into himself and come to amiable terms with his own self-fascination. The observed world in Canute is something he sort of admires and wants to be part of but is a bit afraid of, but the observed world in Snooter is either just what happens around him, or what he's specifically created.
The piece about needing a new "gang" is explicit about this - "what do I like? Me, and comics - I'll make friends with all the people who write to my comic!", as is the set-up of "Running A Publishing House Out Of The Front Room" - but apart from those people all becoming the cast of characters for many of the strips [though many of them had also played roles in Bacchus over the previous few years], it's also implicit in so much of the book being about the joy he takes in his family. Here is the house my work got me. Here is my wife whom I adore. Here are the kids wot I made. Aren't they great? So I don't see him even looking at Australian culture so much (what even is there in Snooter? the Arthur Stace precis? mmaybe, that's on a similar level to the Italy and Lifey anecdotes but what else? here I am at the pub, here I am buying a car...I'll have to flip through tonight) as looking at his culture that he's built around him.
(Though if you're only talking about shearers drinking beer "if one do me no harm" and actresses bathing in champagne, not Snooter at all, fair enough!)
Thesis writers of the future may want to see if they feel like drawing correlations between the tantrumic withdrawal of "I Have Lost My Sense Of Humour" that sets up the opening of Fate Of The Artist, and said culture dissolving from its own component motivations (people having kids and settling into domesticity, people moving to Tasmania, the Campbell kids growing out of the on-paper roles he'd created for them...).
― kit, Monday, 29 May 2006 04:17 (seventeen years ago) link
I guess the main example I was thinking of was stuff from 'Egomania', where he does a big spiel about the painting, 'Chloe', and things like that. Although what you've said makes me wonder if I've been mis-remembering and over-emphasising. I'll have to dig out the 'C' book boxes (moved house 2 years ago and still haven't managed shelves) and have another read.
― James Morrison (JRSM), Monday, 29 May 2006 06:04 (seventeen years ago) link
"The true history of humour may never be written. It defies that kind of organisation. It is the interlude, the relief, graffiti, the half-hidden gesture, the barnacle, the midden, the rhubarb patch. ... It's Shakespeare's clown, Will Kemp, Morris-dancing his way from London to Norwich as a stunt in 1600 and writing a book about it. ... It takes you by surprise in reproductions from illustrated manuscripts."
(from 'how to be an artist'!)
― tom west (thomp), Wednesday, 31 May 2006 19:53 (seventeen years ago) link
one year passes...
Being thoroughly infatuated with the autobio work, I'm inclined to ask:
THE BACCHUS STUFF ANY GOOD (INCLUDING HIS WORKS IN A SIMILAR MODE)?
I'm gonna give 'em a read anyway (natch!) but it's worth pondering, cuz no one really gives them a mention.
― R Baez, Saturday, 5 April 2008 19:19 (sixteen years ago) link