Search Results for: notebook

OUTSIDE THE GARDEN OF KNOWLEDGE

Friday, February 22, 2008

this was found in an old notebook…from about a year ago

MUSICOPHILIA BY OLIVER SACKS

Monday, February 11, 2008

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain is okay. As a huge Oliver Sacks fan and a musician, I thought I was going to like it more than I did. But really, it’s a pretty scattered book. There’s not much of an overarching theme or thread — just 350 pages of Oliver Sacks writing about music and the brain. Which is very cool and all, but it doesn’t make for an engaging long narrative. It might be a good bathroom book: you just pick up a chapter here and there, rather than reading it straight through.

Here’s a big roundup of links related to the book:

ON THE ROAD WITH THE BEATS AT THE RANSOM CENTER

Friday, February 8, 2008

on the road with the beats

There’s a fantastic exhibit that just opened up at the Harry Ransom Center called “On the Road With The Beats,” showcasing the center’s wonderful collection of Beat Generation materials. They have letters from Allen Ginsberg, old Zines by William Burroughs, great prints by Kenneth Patchen, and best of all, a digital display where you can page through Kerouac’s original notebook for On The Road.

On Tuesday we went to the opening and got a 1 1/2 hour tour by the show’s curator, Molly Schwartzburg:

on the road with the beats tour

Here’s Molly on the organization of the show:

“From the first stages of preparing this exhibition, it was clear that place, travel and motion were a natural way to frame the Ransom Center’s Beat holdings….In their lives, art and their love for jazz, the Beats wanted to improvise, to leap into the unknown, the unscripted, the unconventional—and one of the most important ways they did this was through their legendary travels across the country and the oceans.

She’s interested in works that blend together art and the written word, so there was a lot of visual material—so much to look at that I went back on Thursday and I’ll probably have to go back next Thursday. Then I’ll have to go back in early March to see the first 48 feet of Kerouac’s original On The Road scroll.

Here are some of my notes:

And here’s a great quote I read by Kenneth Patchen:

“it happens that very often my writing with pen is interrupted by my writing with brush, but I think of both as writing. In other words, I don’t consider myself to be a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend. It gives an extra dimension to the medium of words.”

On Thursday, I was copying some lettering from a Kenneth Patchen print, and this girl was talking really loud on her cell phone. I gave her a dirty look, and she said, “Sorry!” but then proceeded to continue her conversation. Finally, she came up to me and we enacted the scene in the sketch below:

Whether you like the Beats or not, this is a great show, and I would encourage everyone nearby to go see it.

WEEKEND SKETCHBOOK

Saturday, November 17, 2007

The comic strip is the definition of quotidian: it comes out everyday, you read it on the toilet, it just weaves itself into your everyday life. It’s about little details. It’s not about grand sweeping dramas. Graphic stories are able to show incidental life without having to describe it.”
— Alison Bechdel on the everyday in comics

I’m passionate. I’m disciplined. I play a lot…[When I sit down in front of a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen,] I do a mark on the page, whether it’s virtual or actual paper. Once there is a mark, there’s no fear of not drawing something. It’s a funny thing, but it works every single time…

— PASCAL CAMPION

The way I work nowadays usually is…I don’t really draw a lot….I’ll go months without drawing, but I do keep a notebook…and write down dreams or ideas I have for stories. I just kind of keep filling in those pages and six months or eight months or twelve will go by and I’ll start to panic and I’ll say, ‘I’m never going to do another King-Cat,’ and then at some point…all this work that didn’t really make a lot of sense the day previously, it all just kind of comes together and I’ll think, ‘Ah, this is what the next issue’s going to be,’ and I’ll sit down and I’ll write the stories. I’m a person who allows myself some leeway. If a mistake happens in a comic or I sit down and draw and it takes me off on some tangent I didn’t anticipate, I’m open to following that wherever it may go. But I do usually have it pretty well thought out. But at this point I just see the comics in my head before I ever draw them. So when I have that thing kind of put together, I’ll draw intensely for a period of a couple weeks or a month or so. My comics are so simple, it’s a lot of work that goes into them before the drawing point, but when I actually sit down and draw them it actually goes pretty quickly. And then I’ll put it together, sit down with the pages, edit things and try to make an issue kind of cohesive. Nowadays, it’s still a kind of random thing for me, but I do try to kind of have the issue be a cohesive thing, like an album where these are independent songs but if you take them as a whole they’re a unified expression.
— John Porcellino

I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves….I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion.”
— Daniel Day-Lewis

TUMBLR

Friday, October 26, 2007

This weekend I started re-thinking how I blog and why I blog and whether I should be blogging at all. Here’s a snippet from an interview with Clive Thompson (his great blog is Collision Detection) that pretty much sums up my thoughts:

Some blogs exist solely for people who just surf all day long and they’re like, “Check this out, check this out, check this out.” They’ll post 20 things a day that are all one sentence long. And they’re really cool because they’re filtering the Internet for you. If you like their aesthetic, they’ll find things that are interesting and save you the work. They’re like a little concierge of culture and information.

Now I obviously like doing that, but I got busier when I went back to work, so I didn’t have as much time to blog. And I began to realize that what interested me more was posting about something that I’d discovered and no one else had. Or posting about something that other people were blogging about, but only if I had something interesting to say about it. So I blogged less frequently and I blogged longer little essays, things that were at least 500 words and sometimes up to 1000 words. Every posting became like a mini essay. And that’s the way I still write today.

…My goal is to find something thought provoking, offer people a new way to think about it, and let them check it out themselves. I sometimes just write something that I’m thinking about—there won’t be a link to anything, but that’s rare. Or if there’s something that’s really big on the blogosphere, I’ll try to find an unusual take on it.

I found a post from February where I wrote this: “I’m trying to make this thing as much like a virtual sketchbook/scrapbook/notebook as I can, and avoid the regular trappings of blogging…” What I found out though, is that I want two blogs: 1) the virtual sketchbook/notebook I was writing about and 2) the scrapbook where I just paste random crap from the web that I come across that is cool and interesting but doesn’t deserve much commentary.

So from now on, there will be a blog and a ~~scrapblog~~tumblelog. Now, I’m going to quit messing around on the internet and go draw something that’s actually worth posting.