Notes on writing and drawing

WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

what didnt happen

Another one cut from the book.

The cartoonist Tom Hart (Hutch Owen) has a fantastic blog called “Cartooning Like You Mean It,” and he’s been posting recently about mark-making, poetry, and drama. Here’s a clip from his post, “Drama vs. Poetry“:

Drama is the manipulation of characters and events in opposition with each other. In its most extreme, it is superficial and distancing: tired action movies about good guys and bad guys. In it’s best examples, characters are deeply drawn and communicate, questioning and exploring the themes of the drama both in their behaviors and thoughts.

Poetry I would argue is the single image designed to provoke or evoke other impressions and ideas in the mind and inner eye of the audience. Poetic image is created using the images of our society: people, places, and time etc. At its most extreme and superficial, it is cloying, simplistic, Hallmark cards and childish posters. At its most astute, it uses hints of drama to offer up enough action, enough motion and opposition between the characters and other elements to suggest worlds within the audience and to allow meditative space within them.

(Emphasis mine.)

I’ve often thought of my poems as little scenes from stories told in images made out of words. In fact, when I started making them, almost four years ago, they began as writing exercises to generate ideas for short stories. (Short stories are what they teach you to write in college, and so I tried to write them.)

In the book, Meg and I tried to string the poems together in an order that suggested a rise and fall, a sense of time and place, of movement…of some kind of narrative.

We’ll find out in another year whether we succeeded. The new sale date is February 9, 2010. A year from two days ago.

Who even knows where we’ll all be by then?

(Thanks to Derik Badman for pointing out the Hart quote.)

FORGOTTEN ARTIFACTS AND INSPIRATIONS

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Memory is a funny thing—you think the things you digest and then consciously cast away are forgotten forever—but they’re not. They’re stewing in the pools deep in your subconscious…making your every move..

My mom still lives in the house I grew up in, so when I’m home for the holidays, I often poke around my room and sift through nostalgia from my childhood.

Having just finished the book, I thought it was no coincidence that I found the following artifacts….

* * *

The Smoking Gun book

When I started making blackout poems, I was ignorant of Tom Phillips’ A Humument or found poetry—I was thinking about John Lennon’s FBI files and the de-classified documents on the Smoking Gun website: the way magic-marker-redacted and photocopied documents turn to pure black and white. But I had totally forgotten about this book, which I purchased in high school:

* * *

Green Day’s Nimrod liner notes

My stepmom actually found this left in a dresser drawer at my dad’s house. 1997—I was 14. It wouldn’t be the first time Green Day album art influenced me…

* * *

Tristan Tzara’s “How To Make A Dadaist Poem“

This one truly shocked me. I include Tzara’s manifesto in the book, but I found it only after reading William Burroughs’ The Third Mind. Turns out I’d read it in high school, and even tried out the cut-up method for one of my high school english classes. (Please: no wisecracks about the embarrassing writing and the use of the word “society”.)

Funny thing is, that paragraph is almost identical (in idea) to what I wrote in the introduction to the book!

(Cut-up lyrics to The Velvet Underground’s “Beginning To See The Light”)

* * *

Any artifacts from your childhood that seemed insignificant at the time that you now consider conscious or unconscious influences?

RESIDUE

Saturday, December 20, 2008

res-i-due
noun
a substance that remains after a process such as combustion or evaporation

These are the back and front covers of the notebook I carried around to make, record (see my calendar and checklist), and store all of my blackout poems. I used the back cover (above) to absorb all the marker bleed, and it still reeks from the fumes of hundreds of poems.

The front cover says, “If it isn’t play, what good is it?” and has a quote from Henri Cartier-Bresson:

…we deal in things that are continually vanishing…and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on Earth that can make them come back again…

For photography, this is true: if you don’t snap the shutter at the right time, the moment has vanished.

For blackouts, it’s similar—mark over the wrong word, and it’s gone forever—but also different: as for moments in life that have vanished, blackout poems are the “contrivance” that can make them come back again.

William Burroughs claimed that cut-ups were a form of time-travel, and it’s no coincidence that the second poem in my book is about instructions for a time machine.

I’ve spent the last six months dipping into the pensieve. Now it’s time to move forward, think about the future. Discover the the next project.

How do you fill the empty nest?

A MANIFESTO: WRITE THE BOOK YOU WANT TO READ

Thursday, December 18, 2008

I’m about to finish up the first draft of my manuscript and send it off to my editor.

Last night my wife and I were talking about the book, the book only she and I have read, and I asked her, “Is it something you’d want to read?”

A cliched piece of writing advice is to “write what you know,” but really, this is terrible advice. The late, great John Gardner tells us:

Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche’s censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully and interestingly about one’s own home town, one’s Episcopalian mother, one’s crippled younger sister. For some writers, the advice may work, but when it does, it usually works by a curious accident: The writer writes well about what he knows because he has read primarily fiction of this kind–realistic fiction of the sort we associate with The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, or Harper’s. The writer, in other words, is presenting not so much what he knows about life as what he knows about a particular literary genre. A better answer, though still not an ideal one, might have been “Write the kind of story you know and like best–a ghost story, a science-fiction piece, a realistic story about your childhood, or whatever.”

Though the fact is not always obvious at a glance when we look at works of art very close to us in time, the artist’s primary unit of thought–his primary conscious or unconscious basis for selecting and organizing the details of his work–is genre.”

Not write what you know. Write what you like.

Bradford Cox, lead singer of the band Deerhunter (a new favorite of mine — get their album Microcastle) recently commented on his blog about the leak of the new Animal Collective album:

Back in the 90’s when I was first starting to make 4-track tapes I had a game where I would make a fake version of an album I was anticipating. If Pavement’s Brighten the Corners were (sic) coming out soon, I had to wait till release day to hear it. I would record a set of songs that I would want the Pavement album to sound like. Some of those songs ended up becoming Atlas Sound and Deerhunter songs years later.

My advice to those who are so desperate for AC’s album to leak is to pick up instruments and make your own version of what you would want it to sound like. Respect the BANDS wishes and wait till release day. Then you can compare your new songs with theirs. Who knows. Maybe your album will be the one people are wanting to leak next year.

I’m reminded of the last Dirty Projectors album, where Dave Longstreth found an empty cassette case of Black Flag’s Damaged and recreated the album from memory.

The manifesto is this: draw the art you want to see, make the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read.

LAY IT ALL OUT WHERE YOU CAN LOOK AT IT

Monday, December 8, 2008

Meg took these shots of me working on the book. At this stage, I have about 175 poems scanned and cleaned up. I’d like to have about 150. I was trying to organize them all on the computer in Adobe Bridge, but I wanted to be able to see them all, to touch them, to shuffle them, stack them, sort through them. I decided to print them all out on paper. Now I’m looking for themes and threads, stories and characters, trying to make this thing flow.

It’s a lot like making a mixtape, or sequencing an album. The way the songs butt up against each other can totally color their meanings. One could craft a hundred different albums from the same batch of songs.

The task now is looking. Trying to see a book in this stack of pages.

Dan Roam, in his book, The Back of the Napkin, says “there are four basic rules to apply every time we look at something new.”

dan roam back of the napkin

1. Collect everything we can to look at—the more the better (at least at first).

2. Have a place where we can lay out everything and really look at it, side by side.

3. Always define a basic coordinate system to give us a clear orientation and position.

4. Find ways to cut ruthlessly from everything our eyes bring in—we need to practice visual triage.

Lay it all out where you can look at it. As Edward Tufte says, “Whenever possible, show comparisons adjacent in spaces, not stacked in time.”

Looking leads to seeing which leads to meaning.

David Hockney came to his theory on optics and painting by pinning a photocopied timeline of paintings down one wall of his studio: