Austin Kleon – Page 509

IT’S A GOOD MORNING…

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

…when you have a new Radiohead album to listen to. I figured out that I’ve been listening to this band for something like ten years. Saw them once at Blossom in Ohio, and once in Florence, Italy. Every album is a great event to look forward to. They’ve never let me down.

SHALOM AUSLANDER ON RELIGION AND ANGER

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

I was planning on picking up Foreskin’s Lament this month (I loved, loved, loved Beware of God), but after listening to Auslander’s interview on Fresh Air, I’ll probably pick it up tonight:

Shalom Auslander: [reading from the book]The people who raised me will say I am not religious. They are mistaken. I am painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious, and I have watched lately, dumbfounded and distraught, as around the world, more and more people seem to be finding Gods, each more hateful and bloody than the next, as I’m doing my best to lose Him. I’m failing miserably. I believe in God. It’s been a real problem for me.

Terry Gross: In what sense are you having trouble getting away from God even though you’ve stopped practicing religion and you don’t believe anymore?

Shalom Auslander: The trouble is that all the things I can do to get away from him are intellectual. And all of the things that put Him inside of me are emotional. The Jesuits have an incredibly creepy expression: Give me a boy until he’s seven, and I’ll show you the man. And they know the score. They know that getting in there early and twisting the wires up makes it very difficult later in life to untwist them…And so I can read everthing. I can read Spinoza, and I can read Hitchens, and I can read every book ever written about religion and the secular world, and just how silly it all is, and I’ll put the book down and I’ll wonder where my son is and I’ll assume he’s dead.

He also said something great about anger, and using it for good:

Anger gets a bad wrap. Anger was bad for me when I was self-inflicting it, when I was turning it against my wife, who I wasn’t angry at, because I was afraid to point the gun at the people who deserved it. When I was afraid to express it properly. But everything I read that I like, all the music that I like, all the comedians I like, everything I like comes from that place. And why shouldn’t it?

Great interview, great writer.

SOMETIMES IT REALLY SUCKS TO BE A CARTOONIST

Monday, October 8, 2007

From the sketchbook of Adrian Tomine:

Mark pointed out this great excerpt from an interview with Tomine:

I went out to dinner with my wife at a sushi place in Brooklyn. Right as we were seated at our table, the couple at the adjacent table begins the following exchange:

WOMAN: So, did you read that book I gave you?

MAN: Which one?

WOMAN: The comic. Summer Blonde.

MAN: Oh, yeah. I hated it.

My wife and I locked eyes, like we couldn’t believe this was really happening. We sat there in silence, fakely looking through our menus while the guy proceeded to just eviscerate me in way that was not only cruel but also quite insightful and intelligent. The woman started to get kind of defensive, and she said, “Well, I don’t know. I thought the stories had kind of a nice poetic touch to them.” And that just set the guy off even further. He starts ranting, “No, no…you see? You’re falling for his bullshit! It’s not poetic! It’s like…he’s trying to seem poetic without really saying anything at all!”

I was absolutely paralyzed, and my wife couldn’t take it anymore. She asked the waitress to move us to another seat. They moved us to the sushi bar, but even from there, we could still hear snippets of the guy’s tirade. In particular, I remember hearing him say, “Oh, you must be joking. That was absolutely the worst story in the whole book!” When the couple finished their dinner and got up to leave, my wife started rising from her seat, apparently to give the guy “a piece of her mind.” I had to beg and plead and eventually physically restrain her from saying anything to him. The timing and coincidence of it all seems too implausible to believe, but I swear it’s true, and as far as I know, not some kind of elaborate prank.

Hysterical. Here’s another interview with The Believer.

THAT ONE ODD DETAIL…THE ONE THING THAT ISN’T TYPICAL

Sunday, October 7, 2007

George Saunders on significant details [via]:

“I remember reading somewhere in Hemingway—I think it’s in one of his stories—where a character who’s a writer is talking to his son, and he tells the kid a trick about description. He says: when you go to a Cuban marketplace, your first instinct is to catalog everything you see, especially the stuff that’s typical of a third-world market place. But his advice is to find the one thing that isn’t typical. The example he uses is of a cockfight, where one of the handlers is literally putting the chicken’s head in his mouth and blowing into the chicken, which—not surprisingly—enrages the chicken. And when you get that one odd detail, the whole marketplace will spring up in the reader’s mind. All of the commonplace things—you know, the stalls, the dirt path, the dead pigs and so on—will be supplied by your mind.”