Austin Kleon – Page 573

U GOT THE LOOK*

Friday, July 7, 2006

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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:

CAT’S CRADLE, By Kurt Vonnegut (reread)
CASH, By Johnny Cash
CASE HISTORIES, By Kate Atkinson
MOTHERS AND OTHER MONSTERS, By Maureen McHugh (paperback, re-read)
Something by Elmore Leonard, probably GLITZ, RIO BRAVO, or THE HOT KID
And something by Haruki Murakami, if I can get a cheapo paperback…
And added thanks to Corey: CANDIDE, by Voltaire (preferably Chris Ware’s design)

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.

WRITING ON THE WALLS

Thursday, July 6, 2006

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.

A TIME MACHINE STUCK ON REPEAT

Tuesday, July 4, 2006

“Remembering…is mental time travel, a sort of reliving of something that happened in the past.” —Endel Tulving

my grandparents

my grandparents, in the foreground, at a party

* * *

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

* * *

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.

gun to her back

MORE THOUGHTS ON MAKING A MOUNTAIN OUT OF GAG STRIPS

Friday, June 30, 2006

“Comics get to the essence of something quickly and efficiently….They distill and refine, they don’t necessarily tell stories or have a message.”

—Mark Newgarden in an interview, and “The Little Nun” from We All Die Alone

* * *

Of course, they can tell stories. The trick is just a million different combinations of words and images and panels.

I’m still a bit obsessed with this idea of a novel constructed out of gag strips. The gorgeous thing about a gag strip is that it doesn’t have to be funny, it just has to have a punchline. And the good news is that a decent novel chapter does the same thing: there’s a rise and fall and then a good punchline at the end to give you some kind of closure, but also get you to turn the page and read the next one. What happens next?

Here’s Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without A Country:

It’s damned hard to make jokes work. In Cat’s Cradle, for instance, there are these very short chapters. Each one of them represents one day’s work, and each one is a joke. If I were writing about a tragic situation, it wouldn’t be necessary to time it to make sure the thing works. You can’t really misfire with a tragic scene. It’s bound to be moving if all the right elements are present. But a joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it’s supposed to snap.

There’s a reason why Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library is way better than Jimmy Corrigan. Acme is still Ware’s melancholy world, but Rocket Sam and Big Tex have that snap—that punchline of a good gag strip. (Maybe this is because Ware’s art trumps his writing, and a good deal of the gag strip has to do with the visual tricks involved…)

Now: wouldn’t you love to read a graphic novel’s worth of Mark Newgarden’s “Little Nun” gag strips? (You can check out more of them in McSweeney’s 13 or We All Die Alone). All it would require is continuity. Some kind of journey or quest. The Little Nun could just take a trip across America. Maybe she could meet other nuns. Gather a crew. Fall in love or something. It could go on for something like 100 pages. It’d be so easy to draw, you could just churn out the pages. And think of the serializing potential! It’d be spectacular.

Eventually, I think The Complete Peanuts will read something like this. George Saunders wrote in his Shulz obit:

…try to imagine, say, three kids sitting against the side of a suburban house on a summer afternoon….If these characters are allowed to grow up and leave the suburban lawn and get jobs and fall in love, this is called a novel, and you, the creator, are called a novelist. If the imagined children are not allowed to grow up but are confined to the suburban lawn, where they continue for the next 50 years to be rich manifestations of their creator’s psyche, and if this creator’s imagination is supple and energetic enough never to tire of reimagining the children on the suburban lawn and never to make us tired of observing the children on the suburban lawn, this is called “Peanuts.”

But if you read them all together, doesn’t the collected work take some kind of shape, some rise and fall of action that resembles a narrative? Some continuity that resembles something the steps in a journey? Certainly it presents a world.

Or is it the ending that we demand, the closure, the change, the move to point B from point A?

UNDER THE TREE

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

a new panel from A Terrible Calamity At Sea!

* * *

“I’ve always been interested in the problem of depicting sound in comics. I try to come up with a kind of expressionistic pattern or decorative line to represent the music, something that will spark the imagination of the reader. I was inspired years ago by a wonderful cartoon by Saul Steinberg that showed in graphic form the sounds emerging from different instruments. He drew the different sounds as solid, three-dimensional matter, which made so much sense to me as a strategy to draw sound.”

– Megan Kelso, interview with PW

* * *

“Serializing is an interesting problem….How and where to do it? In the old comics format? Online? Grouped in magazines? The serial offers another kind of freedom, and the added value for authors of ongoing contact with their readers. Creators don’t have to toil for a couple years on a project before it gets received. In the highly interactive age of the text message, the Weblog and Wikipedia, that seems a useful agency.”

– Mark Siegel, Editorial Director, First Second Books, in a PW roundtable

* * *

“I actually love drawing what my peers dismissively call ‘backgrounds’ but what I like to call environments. Just sidewalks and cityscapes and skies. Fields of grass and everything. Or ‘the rest the world’ is another way I like to refer to it. Because one of the problems with a lot of comics art today is that many comics artists learn how to draw people and they just stop there. And they become what Will Eisner called ‘slaves to the close-up.’ They try to close in on the characters as much as possible because they know if they keep their camera angles tight they can keep their backgrounds down to a few lines.”

– Scott McCloud, interview. Other interviews: here and here.