Rambling

Okay, well this post started off as a way to show you this:


Cartoon by Matthew Diffee, via The Cartoon Bank, originally published in The New Yorker, 24 April 2006.

I wish I'd found it in time to add to last week's Vespa moment, that's all.

Then I went traipsing further through the work of Mr Diffee and found this:


(Bet there's a whole TV series with dessert, though.) Cartoon by Matthew Diffee, via The Cartoon Bank, originally published in The New Yorker, 24 November 2003.

Looking for info about the cartoonist, I found this - NEW YORKER Cartoonist Matt Diffee - which I obviously had to add because you shouldn't have to go through life without reading this:

So we're cartoonists at THE NEW YORKER, which sounds like a really good thing and a really cool gig, and it is, but there is a lot of rejection involved.

This is last week's reject. It's a restaurant, a fancy restaurant, and there is this announcement: "Will the owner of the black Humvee in the parking lot please get over themselves."

:)

Then that article led to this one - The Artisan Profile - and this:

Matt Diffee is intimately involved with rejection. He’s a cartoonist for The New Yorker Magazine and in his first year with them he drew 15 cartoons per week. This adds up to 780 cartoons in total, and out of these they only bought 4. [...] the next year things improved – they bought 8. [...] Now in his sixth year, his rate of rejection has lowered to a mere 90%, and he sells about a cartoon a week, which puts him in the magazine almost every issue.

All that rejection! Now he's successful, and still gets rejected 90% of the time. Bloody hell. Made of stern stuff, I think.

And that thought led back to a Thoreau post earlier in the week - Thoreau's Journal: 28-Oct-1853 - in which poor Mr Thoreau had to find a place to store all the unsold copies of his book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:

706 copies out of an edition of 1000 which I bought of Munroe four years ago and have ever since been paying for, and have not quite paid for yet. [...] I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.

How could you look at them and go on? I don't know. I don't think I could. But he did.

Pity there isn't a more uplifting conclusion to this post, really. The end.

No, that's hopeless. Go back to the thing about the Humvee. That was funny. And have a good Friday, please.