Notes on writing and drawing

THERE IS NO ONE THING, ONLY A DOZEN SURFACES

Wednesday, March 1, 2006

Thinking lately about workspaces, about how working with the computer affords the sketchbook greater authority, because tiny scribbles can be scanned and blown up to gigantic proportions, mistakes can be erased, materials of all shapes and kinds and sizes can be formed into one thing–one computer file…and how, there is no original, only a digital collage.

Along the same lines, here’s Jonathan Safran Foer describing Art Spiegelman‘s studio in his essay “Breakdownable,” from the great read, MASTERS OF AMERICAN COMICS:

“At the center of the office was an enviable Captain Kirk-like raised computer station: a pretty serious screen, two scanners, a pad on which to draw straight onto the computer, a side area for sketching, bottles of inks, a can of writing implements, shelves of cds, a stereo console, and various unidentifiable miscellany…

“Beside this setup was a very cool light table, on which rested a drawing-in-progress. Across from that, against the window, was an old-fashioned drafting table. If memory serves, there was a scratched-up desk across from that. There must have been half a dozen desks thoughout the office. How could one person, I wondered, need so many surfaces? Where is the army of Art Spiegelmans?

“We talked about the originals of his drawings. I wanted to use the excuse of this short essay to see them. Art explained that given the way he works, moving freely between paper and the computer, pen, pencil, and ink, no such things exist. There are sketches. And there are drawings done directly on the computer. And there are more fleshed-out drawings. And there are altered, cobbled-together images on the computer. But if one’s dream were to hang In the Shadow of No Towers, from beginning to end, one would be disappointed.”

HATE AND LAUGHTER

Friday, February 17, 2006

tried out on my writing group last night. hard as hell. [PDF] if you want it.

MONSON ON GRAPHICS IN FICTION

Monday, February 13, 2006

Here’s a podcast featuring an interview with Ander Monson, in which he discusses Twin Peaks, book design, and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, among other things. Talking about the graphic elements of Other Electricities:

I had originally composed this book in Pagemaker….It’s really sad now that you don’t see more books with these visual elements. Now we have all the graphic novels happening, and I think that’s a good influence on the publishing world. But even when I was trying to sell this book, I was trying to find an agent for it, and I got letters back that said, “Dude, there’s graphics in here, there’s no way I’m going to be able to sell it,” and I wanted to respond, “Have you seen what people are buying? I mean, they’re buying Chris Ware!”

And about the lack of graphic elements in modern fiction:

My guess is that it has a lot to do with the workshop model in MFA programs. Which, pretty much forbids that you have any kind of graphical element, you have to turn your stories in, in double-spaced, regular type….But I think it also has to do with the production model of traditional publishing, where it has not been reasonable for most writers to include graphic elements. We’ve only had Pagemaker for 5-10 years. So, I’ve got this pet theory that writers, now that the technology is more and more transparent, we’re going to have writers who are able to actually do good things with visual elements in ways that they weren’t able to before.

OU! BA! PO!

Sunday, February 12, 2006

OuBaPo (The Workshop for Potential Comics) is an offshoot of OuLiPo. From the site:

Comics is a medium founded on constraints. Our very sense of what a comic is-whether a newspaper strip, Sunday page, comic book or web comic-is to a large extent determined by formal characteristics or constraints. The project of the French group Oubapo (Workshop for Potential Comics) is to identify those constraints that already exist…and to propose and implement new constraints that can generate new comics….Oubapo is not a movement that you join or follow. Oubapo is an approach to thinking about and creating comics using constraints as a creative principle.

Sean says the group isn’t quite as active as it used to be, but the site is a nice archive of projects. Here and here are two works that he submitted.

PUNX, PA: CUE THE MELLENCAMP

Saturday, February 11, 2006

After watching GROUNDHOG DAY last week, I said to Meg, “Everybody talks about the religious implications of this film, but I wonder if anybody has written about the fact that this storyline could only happen inside the world of a small town?” I dug around, and sure enough, I found an essay by a film critic named Mario Sesti that beat me to the punch:

…the suspicion that behind the calm facade of small-town life hides an invisible presence or god…that may sooner or later make the place degenerate into horror has become a recurrent idea in American cinema….[Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania] is a carillon world, a universe in miniature, perfect and crazy, happy and diabolical-as if infinite repetition were the only form of eternity that our imagination knew how to represent….

Sesti goes on to describe how the character Phil Connors somehow becomes the author of his own story, as he maps the terrain of the place, gets to know his cast of characters.

A small stage, a set, a contained world in which all the characters are known, the geography is mapped, strangers come to town, and small changes are impossible not to notice: this is what the small town has to offer as a setting.