Austin Kleon

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THE QUITTER

I was driving over to our writer’s group meeting last night, and caught the tail end of Harvey Pekar on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Great stuff about work and writing:

PEKAR: I knew I couldn’t make money at the stuff I liked to do. So I took a job that was not challenging, and you know, when it was slow at work, I used to sneak into the corner and read or write. It worked out. It was easy, I didn’t have to go home and worry about the work, I just went and did the work, and went home and thought about writing about something.

GROSS: Now that you don’t have your day job…you can write as much as you’d like. I think most writers find it really hard to write for a good deal of the day. You might have dreamed your whole life of having that flexibility, but now that you have it, what’s it like to have it?

PEKAR: That’s a very good question, Terry. It would be pretty hard for me to write, you know 40 hours a week, 8 hours a day, that kind of week like I did when I was at the V.A.

GROSS: Did you have to learn how to deal with an unstructured day–a day that wasn’t structured by a 9-5 job?

PEKAR: Yeah. I did. At first it freaked me out, uh, In fact, I got so depressed and screwed up I was hospitalized for major depression…

11/8 MAC’S BACKS READING

A cool reading in the hot basement at Mac’s Backs last night, with fiction writers Kelly Link, Dan Chaon, and Maureen McHugh. Link is the editor of the literary magazine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, put out by Small Beer Press, which, along with Link’s book of short stories, MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS, published Maureen McHugh’s new book of short stories, MOTHERS AND OTHER MONSTERS. Dan Chaon teaches at Oberlin and lives right here in Cleveland Heights–his most recent book is the novel, YOU REMIND ME OF ME. I heard one of the audience members say, “Oh, God, it’s like the royalty of Cleveland writing here tonight…”

KELLY LINK
Link read the beginning of the title story from Magic for Beginners. She said the story was inspired from “watching a lot of Buffy reruns.” There was a lot of humor, and the world was engrossing, and the mother in the story was a librarian. Her book is good: “Stone Animals,” about a bunny invasion, really creeped me out. She brought along issue #17 of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, so I picked up a copy of that.

DAN CHAON
“I heard Dave Eggers and Spike Jones are doing an adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are,” Chaon said. “So I called up Quentin Tarentino, and we’re going to collaborate on Goodnight, Moon.” Then Chaon read an unfinished story about a two-headed baby. My favorite line of the story was, “‘I think you’ve been blessed,’ the nurse said.”

After the reading, I was browsing the stacks, and Chaon pointed at me.

CHAON: You’re the Zagara’s guy.
ME: Uh, yeah, hi!
CHAON: It’s Austin, right? You’re a cartoonist?

And I’m thinking, how the hell does Dan Chaon know my name and that I draw cartoons? Turns out, someone pointed out this here blog, and one of the posts to him. (So, hi Dan, if you’re reading.) We talked about Zagaras being the true center of Cleveland literary activity, and I sheepishly tried to convince him that I was REALLY a short story writer, and he introduced me to one of his students who was doing a graphic novel in his workshop, which I thought was great: I wish I’d have done some comics in undergrad workshop.

MAUREEN McHUGH
McHugh started out by saying, “I think Dan and I must watch the same TV.” To which Chaon responded, “Oprah?”

McHugh is currently writing for the gaming industry. “Art is a product of technology,” she said. “The novel only became an art form after the printing press made it cheap to make a book…we’re still figuring out the computer.” She read four stories she’s written for the website lastcallpoker.com, aimed at the site’s target demographic of males 18-34. The first story was about a lesbian ninja named spider. “That’s A Funny Place For A Canoe,” was about a serial killer who shoots a hispanic drug dealer in the head on a street corner. For the third story, McHugh “had to become Elmore Leonard.” “Grind Up Your Bones For Bread” was about a computer hacker named Matt whose plot resembled the life story of William Bonny (aka Billy the Kidd). McHugh had cool postcards with her story “Wicked” printed on the front–I’ve always wondered why more authors don’t do promotional postcards/samples, like visual artists. She ended by holding up her new book and saying, “And if you think the stories in here are going to be anything like what I just read, you’re in for a big surprise!”

And so, there you have it: best reading since McSweeney’s hit Joseph-Beth a couple months ago. Next week: Charles Baxter at Lakewood Public Library.

ONE MORE CHUNK OF DYBEK

Because he’s so right on:

“Maybe one can be too reverent towards an art….You come to revere the art in a way that can be counter-productive…it can lead to romantic images that have to do with focusing on being an artist rather than on the art. Kids…are sent to college as if it were a trade school, and pursuing an art can seem like sacrificing economic security, as if one is required to starve and suffer as supplicants do. Rather than thinking of a craft that you work to learn and do in humility every day, you think of these grand rebel images and end up posturing. Rock, the pop art we all grow up with, reinforces that model. The risk is that on the page you end up settling for attitude rather than experience or imagination.”

INFINITE CANVAS

I’ve been drawing with my tablet pen in Flash recently, and I’m absolutely hooked on vector-based drawing. Drawing with vectors in Flash, you are free from the restrictions of resolution, so you can lay out panels on an 8 x 11 page meant for print, but then you can mega zoom inside each panel and draw in whatever level detail you want. This has worked great for traditional layouts, but I’ve been looking into other possibilites of using Flash for comics…

In REINVENTING COMICS, Scott McCloud coined the concept of the “infinite canvas.” (Check out this page where McCloud “continues his thinking” about the book.) Because of technology like Flash animation, the size of a digital comics page is theoretically infinite, so comics presented online shouldn’t be limited by conventional page sizes. An artist could conceivably display a complete comics story of indefinite length on a single page…

…enter the Tarquin Engine, a Flash-based template created by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey. With Tarquin, you can make huge, labyrinth-like comics with dead ends and web-like paths, that automatically zoom when you click the panels. A prime example of what the Tarquin Engine can do, here. Some other hypercomics, here. I’m tempted by hypercomics, and some online literary magazines like Born Magazine even encourage Flash-based literary endeavors, but on the other hand, I wonder if we shouldn’t just head back to the copy machine.

3 CHUNKS OF DYBEK

From an interview with Stuart Dybek in the November Writer’s Chronicle:

1. On place: “A writer’s relationship to place is more complex and mysterious than whether he physically lives in the place or not. Each writer is wired differently. Some need to be situated there to be nourished by it. Others need to be away from it in order to reimagine it; such writers carry it around with them wherever they go, like an accent…”

2. On the grotesque: “[Wolfgang Kayser, in THE GROTESQUE IN ART AND LITERATURE] says that tragedy and comedy aren’t inclusive enough and that we need a third category, the grotesque. What are its prominent features? The conjoinment between human beings and animals, for instance, one you find in the Metamorphoses: Kafka’s story as well as in Ovid.”

3. On lyric mode vs. narrative mode: “The narrative mode is linear, chronological–this happened, then this happened–it implies cause and effect. The lyrical, by contrast, is the mode of dreams: associative both in terms of image and sound, so that we can get from one idea to the other via assonance, alliteration, rhyme. Time in the lyric is subjective: you can speed it up, slow-mo it, flash forward. Often in stories what is called the epiphany is actually a switch from the narrative to the lyric mode. Joyce’s “The Dead” offers a classic example of this: the story is in the narrative and dramatic mode for most of its length, but at the very end, closure involves a leap into the lyric complete with images of falling snow and the f-sounds Joyce employs.”

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