Above you see an artist’s representation of what the prehistoric Devil Frog, freshly discovered in fossil form, may have looked like. In the foreground is its smaller cousin, the Malagasy frog.

What I like so much about this rendering isn’t the impressive size of the Devil Frog, although I’m sure that if I ever came up against a frog the size of a basketball I would take notice. No, it’s the human psychology underlying this illustration. Good art always tells a story, knowingly or not. Bad art just sits there. One of the games I play with my students is to ask, “What happened just before this scene?” Because scenes are extensions of character, and these characters did something before this scene. In the above illustration, it looks to me like the smaller frog has just rounded a corner and screeched to a halt before colliding with serious trouble. The Devil Frog, or Beelzebufo ampinga, meanwhile, wears a sanguine expression, the sort recognizable by every littler guy all over the world. From the brow ridge to the faint jowly smile, that is an anthropomorphosized expression. Did the artist put it there intentionally, or was it discovered after creation? In my experience of my own writing and that of my students, I don’t know any more. Did Kafka intentionally set out to illuminate in his body of work the 20th century’s bureaucracy of death and degradation, or is it the fortunate byproduct of what he happened to be writing anyway? No matter what the adherents of formalism thought, there’s no separating the creator from the creation, the subtext from the context, or the figment of fossilized frog from the artist rendering it.

I don’t know what to do about the genocide in Darfur, but I would like it to stop. So I’m glad at least one of the presidential candidates has a close advisor who literally wrote the book on genocide. (That candidate would be Barack Obama.)

Here’s an interview with that advisor, Samantha Power. Read it and tell me again whether or not it would be an interesting change of pace to have a president who is intellectually curious. Obama read her book in 2005, then requested a one-hour meeting; it lasted four hours. Gee, an interest in learning things. How old-fashioned.

My favorite line from this piece:

“The idea that [Obama] doesn’t have experience is nuts to me. He’s a constitutional law professor. I happen to miss the Constitution; I thought it was a good document”

My friends Doug and Stephanie Hackney are on a permanent tour of the world. Lucky for them and us, the world is a large place. That way they get to upload awe-inspiring photos like these. Click here to see their photos from the furthest tip of the world and to read Doug’s simple, striking, declarative narrative. Favorite line: “But as the mountains shook off their cloak of nighttime clouds, the day looked more promising.” That approaches Hemingway.

“Everybody who fights me loses,” said my five-year-old this morning, his Pokemon game in hand.

I replied, “You’re not the first to say that.”

A professor of rhetoric digs at the meaning beneath Obamalingua.

This video is well worth your five minutes.

Remember how I was saying that every day is a lesson in what I don’t know? Today’s lesson would be about octopi.

Thanks to Mark Chaet for alerting me to this.

The last week of May at the Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, Nebraska I’m doing two things I like to do: teaching and judging. I like to teach, and I like to judge. (The latter, at least when it comes to the comportment of elected officials, the relative merits of something artistic, and the personal habits of people who are breezily late and/or ill-mannered.) The conference begins May 24th, and if you’d like to join us, you should click here. If you’d just like to see what I’m teaching, click here. (I’ll be teaching two days, and serving as a panelist throughout the week. And also, if past writing or theatre conferences are any indication, hanging out at pool halls and clubs ’til closing.)

When, late last year, they sent me a very nice email asking me if I would do this, once I ascertained that this in no way conflicted with the San Diego Comic Con (which is in July), I agreed, then set about rearranging my schedule so I could do so. (Among other things, I’m teaching a new class this summer at USC. More about that in a future post.) I also thought: Hey, maybe I’ll drive. As we all know, I love driving that Mustang convertible. I could see wide open stretches of America with the top down. I did that in 2004 stumping in Arizona for John Kerry (he lost). And also, I would have my car. So I looked again at my schedule, both personal and professional, then went to Google maps where I always go now because Mapquest has made it a habit of giving me the longest, slowest, most aggravating, and most often wrong route, and then I discovered something I did not know: Omaha, Nebraska is 1554 miles away. In my mind, it was two states over. No, it’s four states over — in the middle of the country. Who knew? I won’t have enough time to drive there and back, and the nice people at the conference are providing a plane ticket. And so, the plains conference became the plane conference.

I take all this time to relate this story because for me every day is an adventure in discovering what I don’t know, including, to paraphrase Socrates, what I don’t know that I don’t know. I’m eager to visit Nebraska because it’s one of the few states I haven’t been to, but until that fateful day when I looked at the map online, I never had a fixed idea where it is. Now I know it’s next to Iowa. That state I can fix on because it’s next to Illinois, and I’ve been there plenty of times. But Nebraska? I know Springsteen did an album I never wanted to listen to about it. I know that 20 years ago a guy I grew up with who was then a sometimes-dangerous drop-dead drunk once took off for there on some strange odyssey he never allowed himself to discuss again. And… that’s it. I know nothing else about Nebraska. But I’m looking forward to finding out more.

Just now I was on Slate.com reading John Dickerson’s piece on why Obama swept the Potomac Primary — my own hunch being, “People prefer him” — but then a banner ad caught my eye. It was for Office 2008 for Mac. Hm, I thought:  productivity upgrades for the Mac. What are they?

Then I clicked. You can do so too, if you’re curious yourself.

What I got was an endless, uncute, and meaningless cartoon in the Thurber style, accompanied by a light bop bass line. A cartoon van pulls up, a stick figure guy is jugging three balls, letters roll back and forth… I still can’t figure out what it’s about. But it went on and on. I finally ditched the site figuring that improvements like this I didn’t need. Note to Microsoft:  People in general don’t wait this long on the internet to learn things, especially people who are seeking increases in productivity!

In what is shaping up as a rough year for heroes of my comic-book youth, “Howard the Duck” creator and “Man-Thing” scribe Steve Gerber has died. Gerber wrote the strangest comic-books of his time, ones where cigar-smoking ducks dispensed wisdom and cows were struck by vampirism and Satan’s son was somehow a rebellious hero, and on and on. Thirty years later I still can’t understand what “Omega the Unknown” was really about, but it stuck with me. (And I still have all eight — only eight! — issues.) Mr. Gerber was very kind to me when I interviewed him for my badly mimeographed fanzine circa 1975, and his comics are proving to be kind to my two younger children, who are currently reading their way through his run in “Defenders,” a comic that once featured a supervillain team that included a woman with a red ball for a head and a gorilla with the balding head of an accountant. His work will live on.

Andrew Sullivan, pulling for Obama, notes a Clintonian lack of self-sacrifice in the opposing camp.