Tag Archives: The Years Have Pants

Charles Hatfield on The Playwright

Posted on by

At The Panelists, Charles Hatfield discusses the Playwright. Here’s an excerpt:

Billed as a comedy about “the sex life of a celibate middle-aged man,” The Playwright is an austere book about an austere life: a life lived at a remove, so to speak, one of productive loneliness, sexlessness, distance, and disconnection. As if to match, the book is narrated in a kind of arid, emotionless third person, and the main characters lack names. There are no balloons, only boxed captions. You can feel the chill.

Go read it! We’ll have more Campbellania here later today….

The Years Have Pants: Preamble

Posted on by

Part of the Eddie Campbell-The Years Have Pants Roundtable

This one’s too big to really get a good grasp of. It’s a wizened but lively old cat at 600 pages and 30 years long. You can hold it up by the scruff of its neck with the strength of one hand, but not for any reasonable duration.

Then again, you don’t really need to. There’s a summary provided by the author himself (and who else better to do it) — a pilgrimage to Hugo Pratt’s breakfast table during a comics festival in Sierre, Switzerland. The words are Pratt’s but they weren’t spoken to Campbell during that meeting. Instead, depending on your faith in the narrator, they were taken from an “older interview” with him where he recounts a kind of third person autobiography, which in turn describes everything that we have read up to that point.

Continue reading →

Utilitarian Review 3/5/11— The Roundtable Has Pants Introduction

Posted on by

The Roundtable Has Pants

Next week we’re going to have a roundtable on Eddie Campbell’s Alec: The Years Have Pants.

Or at least, it was supposed to be on The Years Have Pants. We’ve had a slight bit of mission creep. Specifically, the good folks at have agreed to join us, and over the course of the week they’re going to talk about The Playwright and some other Eddie Campbell works. Also, Robert Stanley Martin writing here is going to talk about The Fate of the Artist.

So it should be a feats for Campbellphiliacs! Hope you’ll join us, both here and at The Panelists! (We’ll link to their posts as they go up, just so you don’t miss any.)

Here’s the ongoing roundtable.

And now for your regularly scheduled Utilitarian Review.

Continue reading →