Austin Kleon – Page 572

WITH THE FUTURE BEHIND YOU, AND THE PAST IN FRONT

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

The book I’m working on includes a kind of memory plot: the main character retrieves his lost memories by retracing his steps, moving through the geographical spaces of his past.

This idea is nothing new: pretty much every character who goes through some kind of trauma in literature deals with it by retracing his steps. Telling his story. Beginning with Odysseus, and more recently, Eternal Sunshine, Memento, Time’s Arrow, Slaughterhouse-Five, etc. These great stories do exactly what they’re supposed to: not only do they give us a map and take us on a journey, they give us a new way of mapping our own lives. (I remember stumbling out of the theater after watching Memento, barely able to read the street signs.)

So this morning I’m reading the good ol’ Science Times, and I get another shocker: according to a recent article published in the Journal of Cognitive Science, “the speakers of Aymara, an Indian language of the high Andes, think of time differently than just about everyone else in the world. They see the future as behind them and the past ahead of them.”

It seems that humans began conflating time and space long before Einstein ever picked up a piece of chalk. Instead of equations, however, we use what are called conceptual metaphors, in which space sits in for time.

Most of us describe the future as ahead or in front of us, and the past as behind us. Until the view of the Aymara speakers was deconstructed, no significant exceptions to this way of thinking about time had been demonstrated….

…the Aymara call the future qhipa pacha/timpu, meaning back or behind time, and the past nayra pacha/timpu, meaning front time. And they gesture ahead of them when remembering things past, and backward when talking about the future.

…the Aymara speakers see the difference between what is known and not known as paramount, and what is known is what you see in front of you, with your own eyes.

The past is known, so it lies ahead of you. (Nayra, or “past,” literally means eye and sight, as well as front.) The future is unknown, so it lies behind you, where you can’t see.

Well, this really blew my mind, and has obvious implications for the story I’m trying to tell. If the future is behind us, and the past up ahead, do we back away from the past, trying to edge closer to the future, but still blind to it? Or do we try to put the past behind us, and are therefore doomed to bump into it in our quest to make it into the future?

I think it also has something to do with comics, another “conceptual metaphor…in which space sits in for time”:

scott mccloud understanding comics page 206 space and time
page from REINVENTING COMICS, quoted by Dylan Horrocks

Of course, Dylan Horrocks and James Kochalka toss this theory on its head: comics don’t just spacially represent time, “comics create a world, a place. Instead of SPACE = TIME, this is SPACE = SPACE.”

I’m not sure where my thoughts are headed at this point, but how curious to me that we must map time in order to conceptualize it. That we all seem to be cartographers, trying to map our worlds…

WESTERN IS DEAD

Monday, June 26, 2006

Kumler Chapel, Western Campus, Miami University

Last Friday, Miami University’s Board of Trustees voted 10-0 in favor of accepting President Garland’s bs recommendation that the Western College Program (School of Interdisciplinary Studies and my alma mater) be eliminated as an academic division. (Here are reports from the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Dayton Daily News, and Hamilton Journal News.) This comes as a disgusting, but not shocking, blow, and will probably forever taint my feelings towards the university which had previously been very, very generous to me.

While I had remarkable professors, friends, classes, and experiences on Main Campus, it was Western that drew me to Miami, and it was Western that made my time there what it was. I met my wife on Western, I met some of my best friends on Western, and I discovered my personal, artistic, and academic voice on Western.

Were I looking at colleges now, there’s no way I would ever end up at Miami.

It was never any secret that the Western program had its problems: a stale curriculum, a weak recruiting and marketing campaign, and a faculty that lacked fresh blood. But despite its shortcomings, the living-learning community and the academic freedom afforded to its students made it not only a unique program, but an essential one: a kind of free-thinking, risk-taking, radical antidote to an otherwise bland, uninspired, and conservative student body. (I’ve made this argument before.)

It seems clear to me that the real reason Western is being dismantled is a political one. Western students are extremely politically active, and made up the overwhelming majority of the dissenting political voice on campus. In 2003, the janitors and dining hall workers of AFSCME Local 209 went on a wage strike, and several of the leading students aiding the effort were Westerners. Same thing with the war. Western has always been a thorn in the side of the administration, and with a conservative President and Provost so fundamentally opposed to the major pillars of liberal education, some prophetically inclined could have seen this coming.

AIDS, Bird Flu, West Nile…forget ’em. Worry about Greed and Stupidity. Because they are the diseases that will destroy us. And they are trickling down from the very top to the very bottom.

They will infect everything.

I suppose there is still a glimmer of hope: the proposed Honors College could actually include an souped-up version of Western, but what was known as Western is probably about to disappear in the next couple years. I’m moved to quote Toni Morrison in her first book, SULA: “Maybe it hadn’t been a community, but it had been a place.” But Western was both a community AND a place, so that quote doesn’t apply.

To those current Westerners still reaping the benefits of a fantastic place, Good Night and Good Luck. Hang in there.

To the Board, President Garland, Provost Herbst, and those Woody Guthrie called, “all you fascists bound to lose,” Good Riddance.

So long Western.

IT’S JUST A SERIES OF GAG STRIPS WRITTEN IN A SECRET CODE

Saturday, June 24, 2006

“To construct a picture-story does not mean you must set yourself up as a master craftsman, to draw out every potential from your material —often down to the dregs! It does not mean you just devise caricatures with a pencil naturally frivolous. Nor is it simply to dramatize a proverb or illustrate a pun. You must actually invent some kind of play, where the parts are arranged by plan and form a satisfactory whole. You do not merely pen a joke or put a refrain in couplets. You make a book: good or bad, sober or silly, crazy or sound in sense.”

—Rudolph Töpffer, Essay on Physiognomy, 1845

* * *

Anything new: you wonder what to call it. I’m calling mine a graphic novel for the marketers. But what it really is is a Cartoon Novel. Or a novel-in-cartoons. Or just a book.

Kurt Vonnegut said he wrote Cat’s Cradle as if each chapter were a joke. Nathaniel West said he originally pictured Miss Lonelyhearts as a novel in comic strips.

I’m trying to write mine as if each page is a gag strip. Only the gags build into a story. And lots of them aren’t funny at all.

Peter Orner’s excellent new book is kind of like that. Each part is a little episode. And the episodes build into something big.

Whatever it is, it’s a book. This, I think, is a revelation.

* * *

– James Kochalka, quoted in Dylan Horrocks’ “The Perfect Planet: Comics, Games, and World-Building.”

* * *

George Saunders says that as a young boy, he felt the language in Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain was a code he could break, “a code that turned out to be more accurate and expressive than the one we all use to slog through normal life.” And breaking this code suggested to him that he might be able to come up with his own code, “a premonition that my complicated feelings about life could be subjugated to that quest, which has turned out to be true.”

People talk about voice and style, and I have no clue what they’re talking about. “Find your voice!” they say.

Screw that. I’m working on my secret code.

CHARLIE BROWN HAS HAD TOO MUCH ON HIS MIND LATELY

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Got an e-mail from Lynda this morning. She had some advice for getting started with the method she used to write ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS!

She said the Chinese and Japanese have completely different ideas about how to approach the brush, so the best idea is to hop over to the library and get different ideas:

The new project she’s working on is really interesting: it’s mixed media/collage, but it reads like a comic.

I was so glad to hear from her, because I’ve been so busy with the book, I’ve yet to hop over to acornplanet.com and buy a sumi-e set. And since I do so much work on the computer, I’ve been looking for something a bit more organic to do in the morning, something to get me loosened up for the book work. And I think the “mysterious horseback experience of riding a brush around a page” (Lynda’s words) is just what I need.

AND ALL I SEE IS SEA

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

I woke up thirsty the day I died
And the tide was swirling
My mouth is so dry
And all I see is sea

– “Swans (Life After Death),” Islands

This is a page of drawings I did for the city in CALAMITY. As usual, I didn’t end up actually using any of them for the page I was working on, but you never know…

I wish I could just have Stanley Donwood illustrate the thing. Those woodcut animations are spectacular. He’s always been a big inspiration to me.

As for the book, having only worked on short stories and comic strips, I’ve never experienced anything like this — not even when I did my senior project. Total immersion in a world. In a set of ideas. If I’m not careful, almost every waking thought can be consumed by the book. For my sanity, and Meg’s sanity, I’m trying to set time limits and totally shut my mind off to it when I’m not at the desk working, but it’s tough.

My dreams have been helping me along. Sometimes I’ll wake up and a panel will come to me. Meg told me that she used to use dreams to help her solve problems. She’d go to sleep, wake up, and know the answer she was looking for.