The 386th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 12, 2024 at 5 pm EST. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public. Please note 5 pm starting time for this event.

Peter Blegvad on his book, ‘Milk: Through a Glass Darkly’

For over fifty years, since he was in his early twenties, Peter Blegvad has been collecting quotations about milk, the primary substance of nutrition and of wonder. All the while his belief in the numinousness of milk has been compounded, that in its opacity and fluid density it is a thing full of both meaning and mystery.
Blegvad will talk about his book, ‘Milk: Through a Glass Darkly’ which gathers these quotations into a mosaic, or literary collage, consisting of almost three hundred and fifty separate passages that consider light, smell, writing, mothers, fathers, colour, nothingness, regression, gender, race, food, cattle, ectoplasm, anti-matter, the moon, sex and insanity amongst other things. 

Born in New York, Peter Blegvad lives in London with his wife, the painter Chloë Fremantle. He has been making music since the mid-1970s with Slapp Happy, Faust, Henry Cow, John Greaves, the Golden Palominos, John Zorn, Andy Partridge and others. As a broadcaster, he created many dozens of ‘eartoons’ (audio cartoons) and several radio plays for BBC Radio 3. His comic strip, ‘The Book of Leviathan’, is published in the UK by Sort Of Books, in the US by Overlook Press, and is also available in Mandarin, Cantonese and French. In 2000 he was awarded the Ordre de la Grande Gidouille by the Collège de ’Pataphysique, Paris, and in 2011 was elected president of the London Institute of ’Pataphysics.