Notes on writing and drawing

WRITING AND DRAWING, DRAWING AND WRITING

Monday, May 22, 2006

“Leonardo, “an unlettered man,” as he described himself, had a difficult relationship with the written word. His knowledge was without equal in all the world, but his ignorance of Latin and grammar prevented him from communicating in writing with the learned men of his time. Certainly he thought he could set down much of his science more clearly in drawings than in words. “O writer, with what letters can you convey the entire figuration with such perfection as drawing gives us here?” he wrote in his notebooks on anatmony. And not just in science but also in philosophy, he was confident he could communicate better by means of painting and drawing. Still he also felt an incessant need to write, to use writing to investigate the world in all its polymorphous manifestations and secrets, and also to give shape to his fantasies, emotions, and rancors–as when he inveighs against men of letters, who were able only to repeat what they had read in the books of others, unlike those who were among the “inventors and interpreters between nature and men.” He therefore wrote more and more. With the passing of the years, he gave up painting and expressed himself through writing and drawing…”

—Italo Calvino on Leonardo da Vinci, “Exactitude,” SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEW MILLENIUM

DRAW YOURSELF A MAP

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

I was on the phone one day with my friend Brandon. Brandon’s a writer, been a serious one for a lot longer than I have, so whenever I get him in a conversation, I drop a little, “So what’re you working on?” question somewhere in the middle of things, a little bait, to see if maybe he’ll bite and spill the beans.

“Oh, I’m just reading, mostly.” The kind of answer that drives me nuts.

So I said, “Well, what are you reading?”

He told me he was picking out certain authors, and then reading everything that author had ever written. (I think at the time, he was tackling Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, and Ian McEwan.) I freaked out a little bit, and said, “Jesus, man, how disciplined of you! I can’t even finish a novel!”

So I hung up later, and got to thinking about his project. A few days earler, I’d read a line of advice from G.S.: “Find two or three writers that you’re really excited about. Follow their lineage back. Know everything about them. Immerse yourself in those writers.” This really clicked with me.

Since I started working in a library, I’ve been on book overload. I can get any book, anytime. No limits. Always a bad idea. So much to read. So little time. Really overwhelming. But this, this was a really great idea: Take it slow and steady. Saturate yourself with a writer’s work. Figure out who means the most to you right now, and then read who meant the most to them. No problem.

But how to begin? A list seemed too linear. What I needed was a map.

I’ve always been a nut about genealogy. When I was in undergrad, Brandon gave me a book of Carver stories. I fell in love with them. Then I found out our teacher had been taught by John Gardner, the same John Gardner who taught Ray Carver. I started building this goof-ball lineage in my mind…that I was somehow inheriting what had come before me.

A family tree!

So once in a while, when I’m feeling lost, feeling a little schizophrenic in my reading habits, I’ll draw a dorky map like the one above, who I’ve read, who I should read.

Where I am, where I should be going.

BRAND ME, PLEASE

Monday, May 15, 2006

“…with his third collection of stories, “In Persuasion Nation,” he’s peddling a line of signature goods. Expertly made, unmistakably his, they’ll be consumed with gusto by the loyal customers who enjoyed “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” and “Pastoralia.” It’s the kind of ironic twist he delights in: George Saunders, sworn enemy of commodification, is in danger of becoming a dependable brand name.”

* * *

Artists out there: there’s a lesson to be learned.

Name awareness. Identification. Purpose. Packaging. Marketing. Graphics. Image. Distribution. Quality assurance. Cumulative impressions. Remembrance. Relationship. Word of mouth. Lifelong customers.

If the customer has heard of us, we’ve done our job.

Is it okay to use the tools of the unholy for the holy? Or is the key to realize that there is no holy or unholy, only tools?

“Me and my wife are Buddhists,” Saunders has said, “and one of the things they teach is that it’s only your limited point of view that makes things holy or unholy.”

Brand-loyalty: isn’t it the dream of every artist?

* * *

UPDATE: Meg sent me this article later this morning, “Building A Brand With A Blog.”

AN EPIGRAPH FOR THE FUTURE

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

I see no necessity to apologize for the imperfections of this or of any similar imagery. Analogies of this kind are only intended to assist us in our attempt to make the complications of mental functioning intelligible.—Sigmund Freud, talking about his dream diagrams

* * *

I think I might use this someday as the epigraph for one of my comics. I collaged it onto the front of my sketchbook, with a few changes:

Clive Thompson made the great point, “your tools help determine how you think. So long as Freud used realistic modes of drawing, he was hemmed in by the dictates of straightforward physiology. To ponder the abstracts of human behavior, he needed to turn to abstract comix.”

Read some more about Freud’s drawings.

JIMMY CORRIGAN, MEET MADAME BOVARY

Monday, April 17, 2006

The Sunday NYTimes came a day late to Circleville this Easter, so Meg, Mom, and I read it over a breakfast of leftovers. I was reading what looks to be the last installment of Ware’s Building Stories series, and Mom said, “What do you think of that?” And I said, “well, I read it for the technique, but the story lines are pretty boring.” And Mom said, “That’s what I thought, but I was afraid that you liked it.” Then she explained to me that she found it really hard to read, after a lifetime of teaching kids left-to-right, up-and-down. So I told her that I thought everybody who comes to his work basically has to re-teach themselves to read. And she said, “Oh, good. I thought I was the only one.”

THEN I was reading in the Book Review about Flaubert, and I had remembered that somewhere (?) someone had suggested that Jimmy Corrigan would make a great companion to Madame Bovary on a reading list. About Flaubert: “Sentences were laid as carefully as fuses. Progress was excruciatingly slow.” And: “The romantic in him wanted to soar above it all, to write a book of pure music, “a book about nothing,” a book held together only by the “internal force of its style.”

That’s all I’ve got. I’m going to grab my old copy of Madame Bovary to take back to Cleveland for further rumination.

Tonight we’re going to drive straight up to Oberlin to see Lynda Barry. I’m really interested to see what a fiction “reading” by a comics writer looks/sounds like. Since I always bring my sketchbooks to these things, I’m going to use Brandy Agerbeck’s graphic facilitations and Alison Bechdel’s recent renderings of a visit to the Center for Cartoon Studies as inspiration. (Check out the program at CCS, by the way. That’s what I’d like my MFA studies to look like. If only CCS had funding and accrediation…)

If you want some more reading, check out Etgar Keret in the funny pages, and Sammy Harkham’s “Black Death” from CRICKETS #1 as a webcomic.