Austin Kleon

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WHY NOT MAKE IT A MONOLOGUE?

For someone who loves stories so much, I’m a terrible oral storyteller. I get the pacing wrong, bungle the chain of events, forget who said what when…. Oral storytelling is a performance, and I’ve always had a hard time with performance. It’s one of the reasons I knew I’d never be a real musician: I always preferred recording on a four-track to singing at the open mic night.

I spent a good hour yesterday in the barber’s chair, telling “The Ballad of Austin and Meghan” to the girl cutting my hair. Since getting engaged, I’ve told the story at least a dozen times, and each time I feel like I never do it justice. Maybe that’s why for our wedding favors, Meg and I want to make a mini-comic about our lives together up until this point. To tell the story and to get it right!

For months I’ve been thinking about what form it should take. At first I thought it should look like a Lynda Barry or a James Kochalka, with the narration covering large gaps of time, and the pictures singling out individual moments and bits of dialogue. (This might be a good place to point out that the usual adage in creative writing class, “show don’t tell,” is useless in the medium of comics — you can show and tell all you want.) But somehow, that idea just didn’t seem right, so I put off starting on it.

Then I started going through my old American Splendor anthology, and came across one of my favorite Crumb/Pekar collaborations:

(If you’ve seen the movie, this story was adapted into a great Paul Giamatti monologue.)

With background, facial expressions, hand gestures, pauses, and other visual cues, comics turns out to be a great way to approximate the experience of oral storytelling. Better yet, you’re not a passive listener — unlike the real-time experience of film or real life, you get to set the rate at which you receive the story. The only thing you don’t get is the sound of the storyteller’s voice.

So, for our mini-comic, it’ll essentially be Meg and I talking to our guests, telling them our story. Only afterwards, they can stick us in their pocket and take us home.

DOUBLE-SPACED, 12 POINT, TIMES NEW ROMAN STRAIGHTJACKET

Short week, this week, what with the holiday coming up and all.

Had a marvelous weekend full of running around and reading books. My reading habits are fluctuating wildly these days between non-fiction, books on design, and comic books. Not too much interest in prose fiction at the moment, although I’ve been dipping into Oliver Twist (which is pretty hilarious, actually, and kind of like a verbal cartoon) here and there.

I spent a lot of this weekend watching football (!): Michigan vs. Ohio State, Notre Dame vs. Army, and the Browns vs. Steelers. This guy named Frank Caliendo does a hilarious John Madden impression. There’s something about John Madden’s voice that makes me depressed — all those wasted Sunday afternoons in front of the TV with my uncles.

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Oh, and Taxi Driver was on AMC Saturday while we were at Meg’s parents. DeNiro is such an absolute joy to watch:

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* * *

This is a quote from a book called Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design:

Until now, language, especially written language, was the most highly valued, the most frequently analysed, the most prescriptively taught and the most meticulously policed code in our society. [If] this is now changing in favour of visual communication, educationalists should perhaps begin to rethink what ‘literacy’ ought to include, and what should be taught under the heading of ‘writing’ in schools. If schools are to equip students adequately for the new semiotic order, if they are not to produce people unable to use the ‘new writing’ actively and effectively, then the old boundaries between ‘writing’ on the one hand, traditionally the form of literacy without which people cannot adequately function as citizens, and, on the other hand, the ‘visual arts’, a marginal subject for the specially gifted, and ‘technical drawing’, a technical subject with limited and specialized application , should be redrawn.

Yep, double-spaced, 12 point, Times New Roman font is a straightjacket that I won’t wear any more. I won’t do it. No sir.

IT MIGHT EVEN BE AN INSULT…

I clipped this photographic cartoon of David Byrne out of a TIME OUT LONDON in April 2004. I was studying in Cambridge, England, one of the most intellectual cities in the world, and felt like a complete idiot. So I guess it was for cheering up. Even though it was torn and had all kinds of thumb-tack holes in it, I recently framed it and put it on our bookshelf.

Some links for your week-end:

Over and out.

THE MIDWESTERN, MARRIED LIFE

Our house is a mess of GRE books right now, so I really don’t have the time to post much anything of any substance.

But I did come across a really great paragraph from an interview with my hero, Lynda, about being married and artistic, and a setup that sounds like everything Meg and I one day hope for:

My husband is a really good painter and a really good sculptor, and the first floor of our big old funky house is his studio. I have the third floor. We mainly live an the second floor, but there isn’t a room in the house without some sort of project going on in it. He works during the day restoring prairies and oak savannas. So at the end of the day there is always a lot to talk about. He drives a tractor around and wears bib overalls and then comes home and we eat dinner and then we both make things in out studios and run up and down the stairs and look at what the other is doing. We work on the house together – we tiled the bathrooms and put up a ceiling in my studio and painted all the walls and do all the things hardcore do-it-yourself types do. We both love to build things and fix things, and we like to hang out together. He makes me laugh really really hard. I have a Casio keyboard I got at a garage sale, and I’ve taught the dogs how to “play” it. They can select rhythms and chords and then they do nose solos. We roll around on the couch laughing a lot at the dog music. It’s a happy active household with occasional explosive scream fights that are also kind of fun. I lucked out with my home life.

And she also talks about why she chooses to live in the rural Midwest:

Well, like Goldilocks, I was looking for the place that felt just right, and it certainly is the Midwest….my first sense experiences were here and whenever I came back to the Midwest, I felt a certain unnameable excitement. like I had found a world that was lost to me. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’m living now where the light is like it was when I was very young.

And though they have nothing to do with being married or living in the Midwest, I am really digging the work of two other female cartoonists, Hope Larson and Lilli Carre. There is an interesting blog called Comic Tools where Hope has disclosed her methods/tools.

Ok, back to the flaming inferno of GRE hell…

COPYING

“I think copying someone’s work is the fastest way to learn certain things about drawing and line. It’s funny how there is such a taboo against it. I learned everything from just copying other people’s work.”

– Lynda Barry

kingcopy.gif

This is my copy of some of the panels from a 1930s Gasoline Alley strip that Frank King drew in the style of a woodcut. I superimposed my own characters. Supposedly, Chris Ware loved this particular strip so much that he tore the page out of the Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics book and had it mounted on the wall of his studio.

Mine’s a library copy, so I can’t go that far.

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