I’m sick of hauling my acoustic guitar down to the beach, where fear of theft and salt water damage keeps me from playing it anyways, so yesterday, we drove over to Guitar Center and bought a ukulele. (Sean, get ready for dueling solos.)
Guitar Center brings back nostalgic memories for me, as in my adolescence, I spent all Christmas or birthday money there, on various gadgets. It’s a wanking wonderland there, and the din from everyone’s noodling solos is strangely conforting.
A sober and thoughtful response to the news of Western’s demise was printed in the Columbus Dispatch today. Here is the nicely-summarizing meat:
The Western program comprises about 1 percent of Miami’s student body but contributes about 10 percent of the honors students…
Two reviews found the program not without flaws but still worth preserving; Barron’s Best Buys in College Education, Eighth Edition, calls it one of Miami’s two strongest programs (the other being the School of Business), and yet an ad hoc committee recommended its closure.
Western is charged with being too expensive, but it is by no means the most expensive program at Miami. It is charged with not drawing enough admissions, but last year the Miami admissions office prohibited Western from recruiting directly from high schools, while still claiming that Western is primarily responsible for its own recruitment. When the transparency of the evaluation process was called into question, a lawyer gained access, via the Ohio Public Records Act, to 1,500 pages of relevant documentation and concluded that indeed, the process had not been open at all.
The University Senate passed, 40-6 with no abstentions, a resolution calling for a further year of study without any other action being taken; it was overruled by the administration — an unusual move, as the Senate exists to deal with academic matters. At every turn, the facts seem to support at least a more detailed evaluation not only of the Western program but also of the decisionmaking process.
Michael Conaway from Union, N.J.: kudos to you.
Hays Cummins and Chris Wolfe have been working on a “Plan B” to try to salvage whatever can be salvaged from the old program for the new, and kudos to them, too. They’re good guys with a lot invested in Western.
But oh, more I think about it all, the angrier I get.
Meg was particularly angry when she heard the news. She was an architecture student, but it was the community life at Western that kept her at Miami. Otherwise, she would’ve split. So you’ve got a couple whose lives would’ve been totally different without Western.
It’s no wonder I’ve been harping about this so much.
The great point that’s been made over and over: it’s not only past, present, and future Western students who suffer from this decision, it’s really everyone at Miami.
But maybe Miami doesn’t deserve what it had. Who knows.
“The process of writing will always be trying to repair something that doesn’t exist with tools you have to invent on the spot.” I read that quote by George Saunders (from an interview with Fugue) right after I read the Dispatch piece.
I’m not sure what exactly it has to do with Western, but it sure as hell seems to fit.
deleted panels from Calamity
Looks different around here, huh?
It’s been years since I made up the old header, and I had some spare art from work on the book, so I decided it was time for a change. Let me know how you like it.
I remember Lynda Barry talking about major writer’s block and having the revelation, “How can you write a book when you don’t have the book to write it in?” So she went out, got a big notebook, made up the cover, and started making a book.
The package is important.
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Here’s Lynda talking some more about making CRUDDY:
I tried not to think about the book unless I was actually writing it….My goal was to not think about things at all. To dream it out instead, trying very hard not to edit at all as I went. The first draft really took shape when I found that I needed to slow way down and distract myself at the same time so I used a paintbrush and Tuscan red watercolor and painted the manuscript on legal paper, trying to concentrate on the calligraphic aspect of writing rather than trying to craft beautiful sentences. I figured as long as the sentences looked beautiful, the rest would take care of itself. That draft was seven hundred pages long. I used a hairdryer when I got to the end of each page so I could stack them without smearing. I can do some pretty nice handwriting now. I tried to write it a word at a time like it was being dictated. Cruddy was the result.
If I am obsessed with Lynda’s advice, it’s only because it’s so good. You have to leave your book at the drawing board. Leave it, leave it, leave it. Make it play. Dream it.
This is tougher to do than it sounds.
What Lynda taps into though, is that you have to DISTRACT yourself somehow from what you are doing, you have to trick your brain into thinking you’re not working, and with me, I can’t distract myself in Microsoft Word. That stupid ass cursor blinks and blinks and all of the time I am thinking, my God, my God, I am wasting my life.
I’ve yet to get my sumi-e set, but I’m going to, SOON.
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I don’t know about you, but around our place, we need a vacation. In a couple weeks we’ll be headed down to the beach with my mom, and I’m bringing absolutely nothing related to the book. For one week, I’m going to read whatever I want, eat a bunch of seafood, walk the beach with Meg and Mom, and swim in the ocean.
Fresh eyes is what I’m hoping for when I get back.
Here’s my reading list so far:
I need just one or two more books to read, so if you’ve got any suggestions, send them my way. Nothing taxing, nothing thick. And NO graphic novels, because I’m trying to get back into reading prose.
We’re due for a Half Price run soon.
*Yes, that’s a Prince reference.
A description of Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oaks:
On the walls behind the writer’s desk, the day-by-day outline of ”A Fable” is famously hand-lettered by Faulkner on the wall….After her husband had finished writing ”A Fable,” Estelle Faulkner, according to legend, rashly ordered the wall repainted, over the outline. Using photographs as a guide, the outraged writer redid it and afterward, shellacked the wall, for the sake of permanence and posterity.
Doesn’t that story remind you of a mom who refuses to paint over the pencil markings on the wall tracking her childrens’ height over the years?
Recently I’ve had the urge to write on the walls.** But that’s the bitch about renting: you want to get your deposit back.
The Next Best Thing? Whiteboards. I started keeping a whiteboard above my desk to keep track of projects, submissions, and to-do lists. Then I got the idea to keep a dry-erase marker in the bathroom by the mirror, for those in-the-shower inspirations (I tend to have a lot of those.)
I was in there today, reading Chris Ware’s ACME NOVELTY collection, and it occured to me that writing on the wall might be the most primitive and accessible art-form, starting with the caveman in Ware’s “Our History of Art,” and ending, perhaps, with Rocket Sam, who, in an awesome gag strip, flies a spaceship all the way across the galaxy just to leave vulgar graffiti on a cave wall in another planet.
It’s not necessarily the desire to be heard, it’s the desire to be seen. And some institutions pick up on that and exploit it. At the Google headquarters, they have dozens of communal whiteboards, where employees can swap ideas and leave graffiti.
Whenever we do buy a house, I’m going to leave a nice section on the wall in my office to scribble. Maybe put up a couple of whiteboards in the foyer.
* * Before you start reading this, you might want to go listen to or watch some TV On The Radio. My sentences are beating to their drums.
“Remembering…is mental time travel, a sort of reliving of something that happened in the past.” —Endel Tulving
my grandparents, in the foreground, at a party
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We celebrated my grandmother’s 80th birthday this weekend, and as we drove into Salem, the open fields and tiny road-side diners took me back, as they always do, to a different time.
It’s my belief that our memories are inextricably linked to places, and that pulling up those memories requires travelling a landscape, rendering the world of that memory.
But I also believe that the human face is its own landscape (something Sergio Leone demonstrated in his films), and so, the sudden appearance of a loved one can also trigger a world of memories. It’s something I’m exploring in the new book, but experienced yesterday firsthand, with all my siblings in one place for the first time in years.
Not only did my old memories come back to me, new memories came back as well. Moments flickered on the edges of my sight that never happened. A life that was never lived. It was something like the opposite of deja vu: what I was seeing in front of me triggered memories that had never existed.
I first encountered this phenomenon in a similar situation: a few years ago my dad and I spent a week in Florida with my brother Nick. It was the most time we’d ever spent together, and as the week went on, like yesterday, I suddenly became aware of a life that could’ve been: a life where we all sat on a back porch after dinner, telling jokes and smoking cigars or something. Were these images uncovering this desire I’ve always had to be closer to my brothers? Or was the desire uncovering these images—this hidden world inside my head that never happened?
* * *
rough sketches of my great-grandfather Sponseller, done from slides
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Chris Ware says of his drawing style:
I try to use the rules of typography to govern the way that I “draw,” which keeps me at a sensible distance from the story as well as being a visual analog to the way we remember and conceptualize the world….I see the black outlines of cartoons as visual approximations of the way we remember general ideas, and I try to use naturalistic color underneath them to simultaneously suggest a perceptual experience, which I think is more or less the way we actually experience the world as adults; we don’t really “see” anymore after a certain age, we spend our time naming and categorizing and identifying and figuring how everything all fits together.
Researchers suggest that we don’t experience déjà vu until the ages of 8 or 9, that up until that point, we simply don’t have the brain development to describe or experience it. But what if, up until that time, we are simply seeing the world for what it is? What if we have no coding or simplifying system or access to a back catalog of images to make the experience possible? As we become older and older, déjà vu experiences become increasingly more common, and especially when we are tired of stressed. When we’re not seeing.
In this article I was reading in the NYTimes yesterday, “Déjà Vu, Again and Again”, there were people who insisted that everything they were experiencing had already happened. Some wires in their brains went screwy, some circuits got crossed, and they stopped seeing new things. Everything had been done. And so they did wacky things like “the woman who turned in her library card because she felt she’d read everything on the shelves.”
My aunt found a bunch of shoeboxes full of beautiful old color slides, so she got a projector, and after the party we all sat in Grandma’s darkened living room, and images of our ancestors flashed on the wall. My dad pointed to faces with a yardstick and told all the stories he knew.
And as the slides passed, looking at these vivid projected colors, I felt the exact opposite of those old folks with the screwy wiring. I felt like nothing had been done. Everything was new. My youth was pulsing, and there were a million lives left to live. A million unknown memories waiting to be visited.
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