Search Results for: log book

BOOK REVIEW: FUN HOME

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

My book review of Alison Bechdel’s FUN HOME ran this month in Cleveland Magazine as part of Cuyahoga County Public Library’s “Choice Books” advertising series. We don’t have a working scanner at the library anymore, so I had to settle for a photocopy:

FUN HOME is a really hard book to do justice in 200 words. Its complexity is its genius: it’s so many things at once. If you still haven’t read it, I’ve done it better justice here and here. Alison is a tremendous cartoonist and a really gracious person.

Weird that I should find the review today, because tonight we’re going with Meg’s dad to Harvey Pekar’s booksigning for the Best of American Comics over at Joseph-Beth. Harvey introduced Alison at her reading in October. Remember: there are no coincidences.

Okay. I’m going to go grab a hotdog and spend the rest of the day reading Eddie Campbell’s THE FATE OF THE ARTIST. (Campbell has a new blog worth checking out.)

MO’ BOOKS, MO’ PROBLEMS

Thursday, June 15, 2006

$The Botany of Desire: A Plant\'s-Eye View of the World$

After reading her short comic, “The Squirrel Mother,” I am a new fan of Megan Kelso. Check out this interview, where she talks about wanting to do something with pictures and words, but not finding the form of comics until her 20s.
The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project blog has cool posts on everything from drawing animals to creating storyboards for TV.
I just got Craig Yoe’s book in the mail yesterday. Wacky stuff exploring the link between fine art and comics.
Whitney Matheson loves Y: The Last Man, and points to an excerpt. I’ve been reading it on and off in the break room.
You will be able to watch some of Bonnaroo via webcast.
Search the plays of Shakespeare with Google.
Graphic novels in libraries? Of course. But the 741.45 dewey decimal has got to go. They deserve their own section.
Eduardo Galeano has a new book out. I can’t recommend SOCCER IN SUN AND SHADOW enough.

“NO APOLOGY NECESSARY” AT DANCINGONFLYASH.COM

Monday, June 12, 2006

Matt Bell and Josh Maday, the two fellas who run Dancing On Fly Ash, asked me if I would like to reimagine one of their 100-word stories into a comic. I like the site, they seem like nice guys, so I said sure:

The original story, “Rationalization/Apology,” is from their book, DANCING ON FLY ASH: ONE HUNDRED WORD STORIES, which is getting some good reviews.

Go check it out.

A WRITER WHO DRAWS

Thursday, December 28, 2006

“I like to think of myself as a writer who draws.”
—Saul Steinberg

Next week we’re going to see the Saul Steinberg show at the Pierpont-Morgan Library in New York. I’m really pumped for it. Steinberg (who was also Romanian, like the Kleons) called himself “a writer who draws,” which led the curator of the show to call his drawings “illuminations,” since they combine word and image in much the same way as illuminated manuscripts. The NYTimes covered the show a while back, David Byrne wrote about it in his journal, and Derik Badman just put scans up from the catalog book, along with some comics-related commentary.

If anybody else has tips for stuff to see in New York next week, leave them in the comments, please!

Start here

Tuesday, September 10, 2024

It can take a while when you’re writing to get to what you’re really trying to say.

One of the most helpful marginal comments is “start here.”

You can often cut to the chase in your draft by deleting the first paragraph or two.

For example, here’s how today’s newsletter, “Same but different,” began:

At the end of my shelves of diaries, I keep a little “on this date” stack, and when I have an idle moment or I’m out of ideas, I’ll flip through the stack and see what else I was doing on today’s date.

I do not recommend this practice if you would prefer to think of time as linear, instead of circular. Over and over again, I find old versions of me feeling the same feelings that I’m feeling now and hearing weird echoes of the present in the pages of the past. Some people might find this depressing, but I find it comforting. The sense that I’ve been here before and maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll be here again.

Just now, flipping through my 2018 diary, I found this entry from September 10th, 2018:

There’s a part in Duncan Hannah’s diary when David Hockney points at a contemporary painting and says, “If art really progressed, then that would be better than a Caravaggio. David Byrne (also once an art student) has said the same— “Presuming that there is such a thing as ‘progress’ when it comes to music… is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present.” Linear progress. Abandon the notion. More like a spiral.

Abe Lincoln once said, “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.”

My notebooks serve to show me just how old my ideas actually are!