Austin Kleon – Page 559

SKULKING AROUND BARNES AND NOBLE

Thursday, October 26, 2006

I really need to get an office.

Right now, our living room doubles as my workspace, and that’s bad, because when I step into the room in the morning, I don’t know whether to write, or take a nap on the couch.

It’s better today, because the radio’s on, and there’s actually SUNLIGHT coming in the front window.

Yesterday I got so stir-crazy I went to Barnes and Noble with my sketchbook to work. I ended up doing little work, and a lot of reading.

I spent the majority of the time reading Ivan Brunetti‘s fantastic new anthology, GRAPHIC FICTION, CARTOONS, & TRUE STORIES. (Here is the table of contents.) If you’re a newcomer to comics, this is probably the new place to start. It’s pretty amazing. I especially like the 20-page section dedicated to Peanuts, which included Art Spiegelman’s New Yorker tribute piece, “Abstract Thought Is A Warm Puppy” and an essay by Schulz himself, “Developing A Comic Strip,” which Brunetti uses in all his classes. (WMFU had an interview with him about the book a few days ago, and here’s another with Mr. Skin.)

Yale University Press has a really outstanding line of comics-related books on the market right now. In The Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists is probably the most unique: it features monologues and skethbook work by folks like Crumb, Panter, and Brunetti, but it also includes personal artifacts from each cartoonists’ stash: old magazines and comics, toys, posters, etc. The best part is Crumb talking about his current project: he’s illustrating every story from Genesis, using three different translations, and “telling it straight.” I can’t wait to see this. It’s going to be 180 pages long, and supposedly, he’s 60 or so pages into it.

But the winner yesterday was the new “graphic” issue of TIN HOUSE. It has a ten page or so excerpt from Lynda Barry’s WHAT IT IS, a new collage/book/thingie about images in progress, and an interview with her, too, not to mention stuff from Stuart Dybek, Marjane Satrapi, and a childhood comic by Dan Chaon.

I love the fact that Lynda sells her stuff over Ebay. Even her “throwaway” sketchbook pages blow my mind:

Here’s a student summary of one of her workshops about “the image” and writing.

WE ARE LADIES AND GENTLEMEN SERVING LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

This sketchbook page is what happens when you put me in customer service training for 4 1/2 hours.

The title of this post is the motto of the Ritz-Cartlon.

Here is my own definition of customer service: tricking people into thinking they’re #1.

Here is the secret to life: knowing that every person is the center of his or her own universe and using that knowledge to manipulate them.

Here’s a quote from Don Barthelme:

“The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.“

THE GHOST OUTLINE OF A FACE

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Really awesome article this morning in the NY Times about artist William Utermohlen, who after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, began drawing/painting self-portraits. The self-portraits, viewed in chronological order, reveal the gradual deterioration of his mind and spirit.

Because Alzheimer affects the “right parietal lobe,” it gets harder and harder to visualize an image and be able to draw it. Art by Alzheimer’s patients becomes “more abstract, the images are blurrier and vague, more surrealistic” and “sometimes there’s use of beautiful, subtle color.”

Looking at these two pieces shoots cold lightning down my spine. It’s so hard to admit to yourself that something you think you do with your heart and soul is really just a bunch of wires connecting your hand to your brain. Maybe it’s for that reason that I find Alzheimer’s to be the most terrifying disease out there.

We’re machines, and machines break down.

I’m also wondering if this Chris Ware quote has any significance:

I see the black outlines of cartoons as visual approximations of the way we remember general ideas, and I try to use naturalistic color underneath them to simultaneously suggest a perceptual experience, which I think is more or less the way we actually experience the world as adults; we don’t really “see” anymore after a certain age, we spend our time naming and categorizing and identifying and figuring how everything all fits together.

And I hate to quote Franzen, but he what about this:

Scott McCloud, in his cartoon treatise “Understanding Comics,” argues that the image you have of yourself when you’re conversing is very different from your image of the person you’re conversing with. Your interlocutor may produce universal smiles and universal frowns, and they may help you to identify with him emotionally, but he also has a particular nose and particular skin and particular hair that continually remind you that he’s an Other. The image you have of your own face, by contrast, is highly cartoonish. When you feel yourself smile, you imagine a cartoon of smiling, not the complete skin-and-nose-and-hair package.

Even towards the end of his abilities, Utermohlen could still make a circle, two dots, and a horizontal line.

Even if it was the face of a ghost, it was still a face.

The BBC also has an article…

SHOWING PIGS, EATING PIGS, DRAWING PIGS

Monday, October 23, 2006

These are research sketches of pigs I did for a new comic called “Showmanship,” which is going to be about my experience raising 4-H hogs for the county fair. They were inspired by a lame-ass interview I saw of Jonathan Safran Foer describing why he’s a vegetarian that I came across while researching Everything Is Illuminated for our book discussion on Wednesday:

There’s no paradox when you’re a child between loving animals and eating animals because you don’t realize that they’re one and the same. Then when you do, people move in one of two directions, either finding ways to reconcile that in their lives, or saying, ‘I don’t have to reconcile it, I just won’t eat animals.’ And that’s what I did.

Foer became a vegetarian when he was nine, which was exactly the same age I was when I started showing hogs. Growing up in Southern Ohio the son of an ex-meatcutter and the grandson of a farmer, I don’t think I even MET a vegetarian until I got to college. And even then, I’ll admit that my reaction to vegetarians was pretty identical to Alex and his grandfather in Everything Is Illuminated :

“You should know…” “Yes?” “I am a… how to say this…” “What?” “I’m a…” “You are very hungry, yes?” “I’m a vegetarian.” “I do not understand.” “I don’t eat meat.” “Why not?” “I just don’t.” “How can you not eat meat?” “I just don’t” “He does not eat meat,” I told Grandfather. “Yes he does,” he informed me. “Yes you do,” I likewise informed the hero. “No. I don’t.” “Why not?” I inquired him again. “I just don’t. No meat.” “Pork?” “No.” “Meat?” “No meat.” “Steak?” “Nope.” “Chickens?” “No.” “Do you eat veal?” “Oh, God. Absolutely no veal.” “What about sausage?” “No sausage either.” I told Grandfather this, and he presented me a very bothered look. “What is wrong with him?” he asked. “Hamburger?” “No.” “Tongue?” “What did he say is wrong with him?” Grandfather asked. “It is just the way he is.” “Does he eat sausage?” “No.” “No sausage!” “No. He says he does not eat sausage.” “In truth?” “That is whht he says.” “But sausage…” “I know.” “In truth you do not eat any sausage?” “No sausage.” “No sausage,” I told Grandfather. He closed his eyes and tried to put his arms around his stomach, but there was not room because of the wheel. It appared like he was becoming sick because the hero would not eat sausage. “Well, let him deduce what he is going to eat. We will to go to the most proximal restaurant.” “You are a schmuck,” I informed the hero.

Of course, I really don’t care whether someone is a vegetarian or not. And I’m fully aware of all the ethical, moral, and health issues involved in meat consumption. I just don’t dig on self-righteousness.

What I do dig is the few authors who love to eat meat and have done some really good writing on the meat-eater’s dilemna.

The first is David Foster Wallace in his essay on the Maine Lobster Festival, “Consider The Lobster ,” where he poses the question “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” and after trying his best to answer it (considering everything from a lobster’s neuroanatomy to the difference between pain and suffering) admits, “I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and…I haven’t succeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.”

The second is Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, whose book is all about tracing the origins of our food, and whose solution to the problems of meat-eating is to find local, organic meat suppliers who feed their animals well and treat them humanely.

Who wants a cheeseburger?

IT SOUNDS GREAT WITH THE VOLUME DOWN

Friday, October 20, 2006

My friend Brandon (who keeps refusing to answer my e-mails now that he’s a fancypants graduate student — maybe he’ll read this and feel guilty) once told me that in the lazy afternoons, he’d been watching soap operas with sound off, writing his own dialogue for the characters on the screen. I thought that sounded like a fun writing exercise, but wasn’t sure what the equivalent would be for drawing.*

Then, a few weeks ago I came across a crappy-looking movie that was shot in the same whaling town one of my characters lived in. So I picked up the DVD, sat down with my sketchbook in front of the TV. But instead of watching it, I used the fast forward and pause buttons to freeze-frame scenes that I thought were pretty decent. Then I super-imposed my own characters over those scenes.

By the time I’d made it through the movie, I had several pages worth of comics panels (without dialogue — but you could certainly add dialogue), and it occured to me, you could do a whole comic like this, if you really wanted to.

* Though, come to think of it, Kenneth Koch used to give his poetry students comic books that they’d never read, and order them to white-out the speech balloons without reading the dialogue, and write their own….