The Revelator

The inter­view took place on Decem­ber 23, 2009 in the back room of the Lark Tav­ern in Albany, New York, seated at a table inlaid with col­or­ful mosaic tiles. Among the swirling pat­terns were five small tiles, pos­si­bly from a game of Bog­gle, which spelled out: W O R D S. Two hours later, after lunch, beer, and a dis­cus­sion that ranged from Bolman’s years pro­duc­ing the Obscuro art zine The White Buf­falo Gazette to his recent appear­ance on the TV show Wife Swap, we left the tav­ern to the sounds of Eric Bur­den and War singing “Spill The Wine, Dig That Girl.”

THE REVELATOR: In one of your bio­graph­i­cal state­ments you describe your­self, say­ing “I’m not really an artist; I’m a writer who needs dia­grams.” What do you mean by that?

ED BOLMAN: I basi­cally have lit­er­ary ideas that make no sense on their own. The big influ­ence there — big, big influ­ence — would be Edward Lear, who wrote lim­er­icks, and I don’t think they make sense sep­a­rated from the draw­ings, which would enhance them, con­tra­dict them, deepen them, etc etc. With the draw­ings they are about as pro­found as you can get. So again I think I am com­ing up with tiny strange ideas but they are not going to make any sense with­out some sort of illustration.

TR: Have you read any of the biogra­phies of Lear?

EB: I’ve read a cou­ple of biogra­phies. I’ve got Col­lected Let­ters, I’ve got a big edi­tion of his Birds. Lovely birds, bet­ter than Audubon. He was nice to the birds, like Audubon would nail them to posts to draw them. But Lear was a lot more com­pas­sion­ate and sym­pa­thetic to his sub­jects. I think they have more per­son­al­ity, which may be a bit of a pathetic fal­lacy. What do you know? One of my anthropomorphisms.

TR: Lear also had incred­i­ble range.

EB: Lear did water­col­ors and he con­sid­ered him­self an oil painter although his big oil paint­ings are kind of stiff. But the water­col­ors he did to pre­pare for them are lovely. Off the cuff he was really good, but when he tried to do more for­mal paint­ings some of the life drained out of them. The car­toons and the water­col­ors are spectacular.

TR: Any­one else besides Edward Lear who you would say was par­tic­u­larly influential?

EB: I’ve been Keelerific in the last cou­ple of years. I’ve got my Keeler Twit­ter. I don’t know how I was aware of Keeler. I was just vaguely aware that there was such a writer and that peo­ple who had heard of him con­sid­ered him to be absolutely ter­ri­ble and that he was the author of books with very strange names. I finally found some books of his some­where, not easy to find. (pulls a stack of Keeler hard­cov­ers out of his day­pack) Like you see this title and I won­der how a main­stream pub­lisher would even pub­lish books with titles like this. I mean what’s going on with this guy?

Here is a para­graph from Harry Stephen Keeler’s most infa­mous novel, The Rid­dle of the Trav­el­ing Skull (first pub­lished in 1934, recently reprinted by McSweeny’s):

{Lis­ten to Bol­man read Keeler. Please note that the back­ground noises on the mp3 record­ing were not added by The Revelator’s team of audio tech­ni­cians for verisimil­i­tude, but are the authen­tic sounds of a pub’s lun­cheon crowd}

TR: In Futu­rama, the car­toon, there was a ref­er­ence to the Keeler Moun­tains just the other day.

EB: That’s because the exec­u­tive pro­ducer and head writer of Futu­rama is Ken Keeler who is a devout Keelerite. And he has adapted Keeler sto­ries to Futu­rama. And he is no rela­tion at all to Harry Stephen Keeler. That’s one of the dis­tin­guished peo­ple influ­enced by Keeler. There’re about 75 peo­ple in the world who even know who he is, but they are inter­est­ing peo­ple. Philip José Farmer used to be in the soci­ety. Neil Gaiman, William Pound­stone, Fran­cis Nevins. Richard Polt is an author­ity on Hei­deg­ger and type­writ­ers. And I con­verted Roger Ebert.

TR: What was the rea­son for start­ing a Keeler Twitter?

EB: I had cer­tainly promised myself to never have any­thing to do with Twit­ter, but then started thinking…well maybe Keeler. If he were around today he would be on there try­ing to find an audi­ence. He spent his last years doing this lit­tle mimeo­graphed zine that he would send to his acquain­tances with lit­tle items of inter­est. Then I thought he would just be Twit­ter­ing if he were around. Some­one has to do it for the poor guy. He spent so many years writ­ing for the void. I just look for Keel­eresque sen­tences of 140 char­ac­ters or less, or that can be edited down to 140 char­ac­ters or less, and post them for a small audience.

TR: The Rev­e­la­tor first got to know of your work through The White Buf­falo Gazette, both from the comics you pub­lished there and from your stint as edi­tor, dur­ing which you turned out monthly issues from Novem­ber 1996 until Decem­ber 1998. What was that whole expe­ri­ence like?

EB: WBG is more or less a col­lage, you just paste up what­ever peo­ple have sent you and run it off. It had no for­mat. It had no struc­ture. We went on for two years and we tried to end it on an opti­mistic note because we pub­lished the penul­ti­mate issue and we pub­lished the last issue—The Last White Buf­falo Gazette (which has hap­pened a cou­ple of times) — we pub­lished the last issue simul­ta­ne­ously with the post-ultimate issue so that the last issue had an issue that came after it.

TR: Any­one could pub­lish an issue of WBG who wanted to.

EB: I think Traf­fic (Max­i­mum Traf­fic, first edi­tor of WBG) and I talked about that and we threw it open. We said if you want to pub­lish one, pub­lish one. And lot of peo­ple just did. It’s a pretty per­plex­ing his­tory. Of course nobody ever num­bered them, which makes it more per­plex­ing. A delib­er­ate attempt to con­fuse schol­ars, so I don’t know if any­one will ever make sense of that. It was delib­er­ately as obfus­cated as possible.

TR: To main­tain that Obscuro ethos.

EB: Yes, it makes it more obscure, yes. What is the Obscuro move­ment? I can’t admit that there is one. If there is one, I might not admit it. If there is one, nobody would know about it any­way. What else is there to say?

TR: Who called them Obscuro comics to begin with?

EB: That’s Max Traf­fic. The Obscuro art move­ment — again, if there is such a thing, I might not admit it and nobody would know about it — it doesn’t really mean any­thing except that group of peo­ple and nobody knew what they were doing. So Max called that the Obscuro art move­ment and that seemed good to me. Max made up the name prob­a­bly in the 90’s. I don’t know any­one except Max and me that use it, so it’s very obscure. The only thing the artists have in com­mon is that they were pub­lish­ing in WBG and they were obscure.

TR: Gorilla Cook­ies, want to say any­thing about that?

EB: That was like a college-humor mag­a­zine that I did with Cat (wife Cather­ine Noel), just putting in any­thing we thought was amus­ing. Any­thing we did. It’s like WBG but focused more on us, just an anthol­ogy of our wacky things. The fifth issue of Gorilla Cook­ies some­how earned a closeup in the motion pic­ture Ghost World. I don’t know why. If I ever meet Terry Zwigoff I’ll ask him.

TR: You now seem to be get­ting back to the slightly sur­real story-telling that you did in the WBG days.

EB: My new ven­ture is Noble Head Fun­nies. I’m try­ing to get back to funny ani­mals and funny inan­i­mate objects in a decon­struc­tion of humor strips, twisted around into some sort of metafic­tional thing. I’ve been work­ing with my son who has been good about con­tribut­ing some writ­ing when I’m stuck on it and don’t know what to do. He’ll write down sto­ries and I’ll go here’s a funny page, here’s some­thing I’ve writ­ten. Let’s mess them together and make some­thing that doesn’t make sense in a sen­si­ble manner.

TR: How did your char­ac­ter The Spit­toon of Hid­den Delights come about?

EB: I was writ­ing a let­ter to Max Traf­fic and just try­ing to think about some­thing to draw on it, and I thought, let’s see what would be the least com­mer­cial car­toon char­ac­ters that I could imag­ine. And what comes to mind are The Spit­toon of Hid­den Delights and Black-Rayed Sun. So I did a Sun and Spit­toon gag car­toon on a let­ter to Max, and they ended up being sup­port­ing char­ac­ters in Noble Head Fun­nies.

TR: Read­ers of The Rev­e­la­tor are a dis­tin­guished group, movers and shak­ers the world over, whether it be in art, sports, or pol­i­tics. So of course they are fas­ci­nated by your season-four appear­ance on the real­ity tele­vi­sion show Wife Swap.

EB: I hope you didn’t see it.

TR: Sadly enough, no.

EB: That’s a relief. That was a well-paying but hor­ri­ble week. We just did that because Cat was look­ing for some way to pro­mote her radio show. Wife Swap was sniff­ing around. If they think of a kind of mom they want, they look for them. They were think­ing: we want a shock-jock mom. Now I don’t think there is any such a thing as a shock jock and nobody has really used that term in fif­teen years. But she was close enough. You get two-grand a day to be abused. I got a new wife from Texas who ran a pet cre­ma­to­rium. She was pretty night­mar­ish and I got a lot of abuse from her. I got a lot of abuse on the show and then of course it airs and it’s watched by inter­net trolls who abuse you on the internet.

TR: Real­ity is Hell.

Well, of course Wife Swap cre­ates a fic­tional ver­sion of you. They saw there were Hawai­ian shirts that I brought back from Hawaii and they said, “These will annoy her, wear Hawai­ian shirts every day.” So I wore Hawai­ian shirts every day and she hated it. I’m not a pro­fes­sional wearer of Hawai­ian shirts. They man­age the real­ity to make it more awful. For instance, they decided to tell Sue Ann that my wife was an announcer at strip clubs because they fig­ured that would offend her and they would send her to strip clubs to take the place of my wife. They said, “Oh the radio sta­tion sends her to strip clubs to pro­mote the radio show. Go ahead.” So I had to take her to a strip club and she was very offended and screamed at me that I was a mon­ster for endors­ing this. This isn’t even true and I’m get­ting screamed at. They just make shit up to cause more trouble.

Let me now praise the gov­er­nor of New York, Eliot Spitzer. We were on Wife Swap and it was a ten-days won­der in Albany. Every­body was talk­ing about it. Then the week after Wife Swap aired Eliot Spitzer got caught with pros­ti­tutes and every­one for­got about us. Our fif­teen min­utes of fame was ended by Eliot Spitzer and he will always have my vote.

TR: Did you know that another Bol­man has appeared on Wife Swap? One of The Rev­e­la­tor interns dis­cov­ered this when doing back­ground research for the interview.

EB: Are you seri­ous? Another Bol­man? There are hardly any Bolmans.

TR: There are You Tube videos of his eco­log­i­cal con­struc­tion projects out in Oregon.

EB: I’d be happy to build envi­ron­men­tally friendly struc­tures in Ore­gon if any­body wanted me to.

Wait­ress: Just check­ing on you guys. Do you need anything?

EB (to wait­ress): I don’t.

Wait­ress: Do you want me to bring the check?

TR (to wait­ress): You can bring the check.

EB (to wait­ress): Thank you so much.

TR: We bet­ter fin­ish up. What’s your favorite album or favorite thing you’ve lis­tened to recently?

EB: In the car I’ve got Bug Music by Don Byron, and that’s really good. He’s a jazz clar­inetist. On Bug Music he cov­ers Duke Elling­ton and John Kirby and Ray­mond Scott.

TR: That’s cool. We can rephrase the ques­tion in the inter­view and ask “What’s play­ing in your car?” Any­thing else you think peo­ple should know about that they don’t know about?

EB: Jim Copp and Ed Brown. Play­house Records. Two of the great out­sider artists of the twen­ti­eth century.

TR: What do they do?

EB: Jim Copp started out as an eccen­tric night­club per­former. He used to open for Bil­lie Hol­i­day but do an insanely weird act, very strange songs. He later started doing children’s records in the fifties. Nobody would let him do children’s records on his own terms so he’d put them out him­self and mar­ket them him­self. He should be as well known as Dr. Seuss. I talked to him on the phone when he was alive. He died just before Shel Sil­ver­stein and Sil­ver­stein got all the press.

When I was a kid, some­one gave me a Jim Copp record: A Jour­ney to San Fran­cisco with the Glups. That was the only one I had when I was a kid. In one scene, I think on side one, the Glups lose their cow –the Glups are a fam­ily from Maine — and they go to the slaugh­ter­house look­ing for their cow. And you hear cows and pigs get­ting their heads chopped off. It’s like “Oink, oink” and shh­hh­lich.! “Moo, moo” and shh­hh­lich! And their heads were chopped off! I mean who the Hell puts that on a children’s record?

Wait­ress: Here’s your check and then here’s some lit­tle treats for the holidays.

EB: Ooh, treats!