Austin Kleon – Page 571

BACK TO OHIO [UPDATED]

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Meet me at the back-shack, baby
You’ll bring your little ukelele
Oh take up reel! make it all right
Let’s make a song on the 8-track tonight

– Mirah & Ginger – “Oh! September”

[audio:http://www.kpunk.com/media/audio/mirahginger_ohseptember.mp3] [MP3]

“pack up the patch cords…”

vacation is over. this is a comic i drew on the 11 hour drive back home. now we have nice tans and clear heads to tackle the second half of the year, which is bound to be insane…

the only bad thing to happen on vacation: my powerbook crashed (!!) and now i’m worried, worried, worried that i’ve lost all my photos/music from the past two or three years… (the book, however, is safe on a flash drive.) so learn a lesson and back up your hard drives, youngsters!

MAYBE THE GOAL OF ART SHOULD BE MAKING YOURSELF APPRECIATE BEING ALIVE WHILE YOU’RE MAKING IT

Thursday, July 20, 2006

I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, “The Beatles did.”

– Vonnegut, TIMEQUAKE

one more day of vacation…

LITERARY WESTERNS

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

This week I guest-blogged for Laurie von Mehren, a Cleveland poet and our literary specialist over at the library. I mentioned to Laurie that I was a huge fan of Westerns, and that it might be cool to do a post on literary Westerns for the library’s website. Laurie said, “Literary Westerns? I didn’t know such things existed.” So, of course, some reader’s advisory was in order:

Clint Eastwood once said that as far as he was concerned, Americans didn’t have any original art except jazz and Westerns. With the popularity of the stellar HBO Western series DEADWOOD, there’s been a renewed interest in our great American genre. This week we’re going to give you a crash-course in that rarest of species, the literary Western.

But before we do, take DEADWOOD creator David Milch’s advice and catch up on your King James Bible, Shakespeare, and Victorians, because those are the books that Americans of the late-19th century West would’ve had access to…

Then, start out with Elmore Leonard. Although he’s best known for his mysteries, he cut his teeth writing Westerns. Check out THE COMPLETE WESTERN STORIES OF ELMORE LEONARD, THE TONTO WOMAN, and his marvelous latest novel, THE HOT KID, which reads like a 30s ganster novel set in the West.

When you’re feeling up to it, move on to Cormac McCarthy. Devour his acclaimed Border Trilogy (ALL THE PRETTY HORSES, THE CROSSING, CITIES OF THE PLAIN), and then experience the bloody glory of his Sam Peckinpah-meets-Heironymus Bosch-as-written-by-William-Faulkner horror masterpiece, BLOOD MERIDIAN, which the New York Times just recently voted one of the best American novels of the last 25 years. It’s one of my favorite books, ever.

After you’ve taken those in, turn a 360, and read the Wyoming stories of Annie Proulx (CLOSE RANGE, BAD DIRT.) She wrote a short-story that was made into a movie you just might have heard of, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN.

Happy readin’, pardners.

Oddly enough, I became obsessed with Westerns when I was living in England. I lived in a crap apartment in a crap neighborhood in Cambridge, and the Blockbuster down the street had a nice collection. Here’s some of my favorites, courtesy of YouTube: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Once Upon A Time In The West, Dead Man, Deadwood, and Unforgiven. (No link for McCabe & Mrs. Miller…)

Other links of interest: the NYTimes profiled Deadwood a while back, pondered the influence of The Searchers, and Salon proclaimed the Western will never die and provided a great reading list to catch up.

HE WAS CONSCIOUS OF HAVING LOST

Monday, July 17, 2006

“…he seemed to have lost the ability not only to see color, but to imagine or remember it, even to dream of it. Nevertheless, like an amnesiac, he in some way remained conscious of having lost color, after a lifetime of chromatic vision, and complained of his world feeling impoverished, grotesque, abnormal — his art, his food, even his wife looked ‘leaden’ to him.”

– Oliver Sacks, The Island Of The Colorblind

Greetings from South Carolina. The past few days I’ve done nothing but swim, tan, play the ukulele, walk the beach, eat and read. I’m in paradise.

I foolishly thought I’d be able to leave the book behind, but I forgot how the ocean waves have a way of clearing your mind of junk and leaving it free to do the good thinking. So, I’ve resumed working in my sketchbook. This afternoon I drew a boy battling the waves with his raft. It was perfect.

Other highlights: last night Meghan made her famous shrimp boil, and this morning I finished Elmore Leonard’s spectacular GET SHORTY.

It’s supposed to be 90 degrees up in Cleveland…hope everyone’s staying cool.

PAPERBACK DRAWER

Friday, July 14, 2006

I finally got my hands on the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of CANDIDE with Chris Ware’s cover design. It’s a beautiful production, with French Flaps and deckle-edged paper (where the pages are rough cut on the edges).

So beautiful, in fact, that if I had my pick of format for my first graphic novel, I’d probably skip a hardcover edition completely and put out a high-quality paperback original with French flaps and deckle-edges like the Penguin Deluxe editions.** You wouldn’t make as much profit per book, but for a first book, you’re not necessarily looking to profit, you’re just looking to get your work out there and start your brand. With lower sticker prices, paperbacks attract more buyers, and booksellers are more willing to take a risk on an unknown author.

Martin Asher, the editor in chief of Vintage/Anchor Books, agrees:

“Book for book, you’re obviously going to make more money on a hardcover….But you can usually sell two or more paperbacks for every hardcover, and when you bring in the question of building an audience for a new writer,” the scale tips further in the paperback original’s favor.

Of course, these numbers we’re talking about are for first prose-fiction books. Graphic novels are selling so well, it might be ridiculous to put out a paperback first. You let the hype build with the hardcover, and then wait for new life in paperback. (Pantheon does a good job with their graphic novel paperbacks: Marjane Satrapi’s PERSEPOLIS and Ware’s JIMMY CORRIGAN look great in both editions.)

On the other hand, if you’re looking to build cred with the young audience who is more apt to read graphic novels, the deluxe paperback might be the way to go. Here’s an excerpt from a NYTimes article on paperbacks that ran today:

The target audience for a paperback is often different from that for hardcovers. “I think of paperback readers as the smarter, hipper, younger readers,” said Marty Asher, editor in chief of Vintage/Anchor Books, the paperback imprint of the Knopf Group. He noted that books like “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro, or titles by Haruki Murakami, the Japanese novelist, tend to appeal to readers who frankly prefer the lower price of a paperback.