Notes on writing and drawing

AN ARTIST NOT-IN-RESIDENCE

Monday, June 18, 2007

A Saul Steinberg doodle on Smithsonian letterhead, from an article in The Smithsonian:

In 1967, then-Secretary of the Smithsonian S. Dillon Ripley invited Saul Steinberg to serve as the Institution’s first and only artist-in-residence….

The job description for the post—which included a then-generous stipend of $11,000—was imprecise; even the length of tenure was vague, although Steinberg, in a December 1965 letter to Ripley, spoke of staying “for at least 6 months or perhaps a whole year.” In fact, the artist remained in town less than four months, working out of a comfortable rented town house rather than the office provided for him. A January 1967 Washington Star headline told the story: “Smithsonian’s Steinberg: An Artist Not-in-Residence.”

But despite this aloofness and a sincere dislike of Washington—a city Steinberg would later describe in the pages of this magazine as having “ready-made art, bland townhouses of Georgetown, goody-goody churches, a completely American kind of city planning”—the artist delivered fair value for Ripley’s largesse.

Steinberg drawings often incorporate found graphics such as official-looking seals and rubber stamps and coin rubbings, so it was pure serendipity that the Smithsonian letterhead at the time included an engraving of the Institution’s signature building, the James Renwick-designed structure known to this day as the Castle. Steinberg had predicted that when he got to Washington, he would “feel my way along and decide then what to do.” The solution was quickly at hand: the stationery would constitute his sketch pad, and the letterhead would become an integral element of each drawing. By the time the artist headed back home to New York City, he left behind, according to Joann Moser, a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), a total of 36 drawings, “everything done on that stationery.”

So Steinbergian, so perfect.

Some of these pieces were in the Illuminations show and book:

TNT EN AMERIQUE BY JOCHEN GERNER

Monday, June 4, 2007

Matt Madden was kind enough to clue me in to the existence of Jochen Gerner’s TNT En Amerique — a blackout comic that takes Herge’s Tintin In America and reduces the speech bubbles to phrases and the colors to graphic symbols. The project came about through Gerner’s experience with OuBaPo — the comics equivalent of the group exploring writing with constraints, OuLiPo.

Here’s a look at one of the pages:

Gerner says of his work (obviously a translation from French):

The main interest for me of the comic strip is the infinite possible links between text and image: a system of representation continually confronting, in a kind of alchemy, text and picture….The idea “TNT en Amérique” sprang from…OuBaPo, from exercises, experiments. I try to find new reading perspectives. I dismantle a given material to make something else of it…. I bought…old copies of “Tintin en Amérique”. [I] worked directly on the printed editions by cutting the pages one by one and covering them thickly with black ink….I did not see this book as a “technical feat” but as the discovery of a secret passage , of a dark track followed to the end.

I can’t get a close enough look at the pages to really tell exactly what’s going on, but it’s got something to do with violence and America: Gerner goes on about how the page became “night” with unblackened color emerging like neon signs from American life. Here’s a few page spreads from the publisher’s site:

James Kochalka has said of this kind of thing, “remixes destroy the original comic art, but create something new and wonderful from it. Like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, destruction equals creation.” I dig it.

I’d write more about OuBaPo and OuLiPo, but we’re trying to pack up for our big Austin apartment-hunting trip. For more on my thoughts about writing and restraints, see these past posts: “Mathematical Storytelling,” “A Humument,” and my “Newspaper Blackout Poems.”

Big thanks to Matt for the tip! Be sure to check out his really cool book, 99 Ways To Tell A Story: Exercise In Style, and his blog.

OUR WAY OF BEING IN THE WORLD: ZADIE SMITH ON WRITING AND PERSONALITY

Friday, June 1, 2007

A writer’s personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. When you understand style in these terms, you don’t think of it as merely a matter of fanciful syntax, or as the flamboyant icing atop a plain literary cake, nor as the uncontrollable result of some mysterious velocity coiled within language itself. Rather, you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness. Style is a writer’s way of telling the truth. Literary success or failure, by this measure, depends not only on the refinement of words on a page, but in the refinement of a consciousness, what Aristotle called the education of the emotions.”

– Zadie Smith, “Fail Better***

Now THAT’S something they don’t teach you in creative writing class. That YOU might have to actually work on YOURSELF instead of your writing…

Style is a trace of the writer’s personality.

And writing with pictures is no different. In fact, I feel that the personality of style is even easier to detect in cartoonists, probably because what you’re seeing in the cartoonist’s art is the actual marks of his or her hand. (Anybody up for some handwriting analysis?) Think of it: R. Crumb. Lynda Barry. James Kochalka. Charles Schulz. Personalities inked all over the page.

This is why I return to people’s writing and writing with pictures: to read what they have to say. To soak up their manner of being in the world. Like Smith, this is also why I write. “When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world.”

But what IS this way of being? What is personality? Smith says it’s much more than autobiographical detail, “it’s our way of processing the world, our way of being, and it cannot be artificially removed from our activities.” It’s about perspective, not autiobiography — not necessarily what you’ve seen, but how you’ve seen it.

It’s also about what we read and what allies we choose to make. “The choices a writer makes within a tradition – preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme – constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.” It’s about what we weed out of our brains and our souls: “a process of elimination.”

[O]nce you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment – once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in – what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. That is what I am looking for when I read a novel; one person’s truth as far as it can be rendered through language.”

Reading, looking, writing, and drawing–you do it all at the same time, and slowly chisel yourself out of a big block of DNA. You gotta work on YOURSELF, along with your writing. This is something that doesn’t fly in your typical workshop. Craft might not be “the enemy,” as James Kochalka says, but it certainly ain’t the whole picture, either.

[W]riting is the craft that defies craftsmanship: craftsmanship alone will not make a novel great. This is hard for young writers…to grasp at first. A skilled cabinet-maker will make good cabinets, and a skilled cobbler will mend your shoes, but skilled writers very rarely write good books and almost never write great ones. There is a rogue element somewhere – for convenience’s sake we’ll call it the self, although, in less metaphysically challenged times, the “soul” would have done just as well. In our public literary conversations we are squeamish about the connection between selves and novels. We are repelled by the idea that writing fiction might be, among other things, a question of character. We like to think of fiction as the playground of language, independent of its originator….Though we rarely say it publicly, we know that our fictions are not as disconnected from our selves as you like to imagine and we like to pretend. It is this intimate side of literary failure that is so interesting; the ways in which writers fail on their own terms: private, difficult to express, easy to ridicule, completely unsuited for either the regulatory atmosphere of reviews or the objective interrogation of seminars, and yet, despite all this, true.”

Unfortunately, I have no link to the full text of Smith’s article. I was going through my desk at work today and found an old printout of it covered with highlighter from some lunch in the breakroom, and I was about to toss it until I realized the Guardian doesn’t make it available online anymore. It ran in two parts, beginning on Saturday, January 13th, 2007. I remember it making the blog rounds, but somehow, I never commented on it. Link to the article.

WHAT VANISHING POINT? SOME REALLY BRIEF THOUGHTS ON COMICS AND PERSPECTIVE

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

David Hockney argues that the use of optical lenses probably had something to do with the widespread the 15th century method of perspective:

…the [optical] projection yields up one-point perspective–and nothing else does. It’s difficult nowadays, in a world saturated with television and photographs and billboards and movies, to recall how radically new one-point perspective would have appeared to those first exposed to it. That’s not how the world presents itself and can’t help but present itself through a one-point projection, be it a pinhole or a lens or a curved mirror.”

We see with two eyes. It’s called “binocular vision.” Each eye receives a slightly different image, and the brain processes the two images into 3-D to generate the sensation of depth.

Western one-point perspective is an attempt to fabricate this sensation. It is an illusion. Hockney calls it “the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops.”

And when it comes to comics, some of my favorite artists choose to completely ignore it.

Here’s Scott McCloud from Making Comics:

Dig this funky Grosz. See a vanishing point?

What about this Ron Rege?

Death to tyrannical ~~one-point~~ linear perspective!

SO MUCH TO LEARN, FROM SO MANY TEACHERS

Monday, May 14, 2007

I was doing the job search thing all morning, doctor’s appointment this afternoon (My doctor was from San Antonio, and he assured me that we would have an excellent time in Austin–the signs continue…), and the reference desk this evening. I have nothing to new to post–only these nuggets of wisdom I’ve gleaned from the corners of the internet:

Maureen McHugh, Ohioan-turned-Austinite, on characterization & plot :

My working definition of plot is character in situation. That’s a dicey definition because I think ‘characterization’ can rest of the flimsiest of textual tricks. A lot of what we think of as characterization comes from what cognitive psychologists call Theory of Mind. (That’s part of what autistic people struggle with and to not have a Theory of Mind is to be Mindblind.) Humans are highly social creatures and we spend a lot of time assuming that other people are, in fact, other people. That they have intentionality, emotion, and that we have a sense of what they are about….

We are so hardwired to make assumptions about other people’s interior states, that we make assumptions about all sorts of interior states. We personify stuff. We describe houses as ‘happy’ or ‘gloomy’. We think that the grocery cart has it in for our car door. We think that characters in fiction are people. We can leap to rather complex assumptions about them on the basis of fairly flimsy details. The details that we find most telling tend to be their actions. So in fact, part of character is what I describe them doing, and if I think of situation and describe characters acting in the situation, I am in fact characterizing as much as I am generating plot.”

* * *

More on plot, sent to me by Brandon, from John Fowles’, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, pg. 406:

The one want combats the other want, and fails or succeeds, as the actuality may be…the writer puts the conflicting wants in the ring and then describes the fight — but in fact fixes the fight, letting that want he himself favors win. And we judge writers of fiction both by the skill they show in fixing the fights (in other words, in persuading us that they were not fixed) andby the kind of fighter they fix in favor of: the good one, the tragic one, the evil one, the funny one, and so on.

“But the chief argument for fight-fixing is to show one’s readers that one thinks of the world around one — whether one is a pessimist, an optimist, what you will.”

* * *

Jordan Crane on splash pages and uniform panel size in an interview with Tom Spurgeon:

I feel like having each panel the same size and the same number on the page, the same spacing and all that, kind of relegates the story to everything that happens inside the panels. The sensational things, the high points and the low points, and the extra dramatics rely on the narrative flow rather than drawing it bigger. So that’s what I tried to focus on: the content of the panels rather than drawing it really big, relying on that. That had always really bothered me in comics. Splash page: this means it matters. This part is important. It always really bugged me….

Oh, God, reading modern superhero comics, none of it makes any fucking sense. It’s not a language. It’s just a bunch of drawings where you can read the words and string it together narratively and get through it. But there’s no language, there’s no punctuation, there’s nothing that makes formal sense about it.

It’s worth noting that Sammy Harkham, Crane’s studio mate, makes similar arguments.

* * *

Tony Millionaire on cartooning and deadlines, from a fantastic profile in the NYTimes

No matter what, I’ve got to get my weekly ‘Maakies’ out….That’s my soul. Without it I’d still be a bum, I’d still be drawing houses. I needed a deadline. That’s the code of the cartoonist: make the deadline.”

* * *

And finally, be sure to check out Craig Thompson’s gorgeous sketchbook pages on his new blog. My favorite of his books, Carnet de Voyage, or Travel Journal, is this times two-hundred and twenty-four.