Did you know that Screamin’ Jay Hawkins fathered almost 75 children? That he was the middleweight boxing champion of Alaska? That he used to come out of a foggy coffin onstage with tusks in his nose and a cigarette-smoking skull named Henry? That he was born in Cleveland and died in Paris?
*** from an interview with Screamin’ Jay
I see no necessity to apologize for the imperfections of this or of any similar imagery. Analogies of this kind are only intended to assist us in our attempt to make the complications of mental functioning intelligible.—Sigmund Freud, talking about his dream diagrams
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I think I might use this someday as the epigraph for one of my comics. I collaged it onto the front of my sketchbook, with a few changes:
Clive Thompson made the great point, “your tools help determine how you think. So long as Freud used realistic modes of drawing, he was hemmed in by the dictates of straightforward physiology. To ponder the abstracts of human behavior, he needed to turn to abstract comix.”
Read some more about Freud’s drawings.
The B pipe on my Honda needed replaced, so I sat in a Starbucks all morning and drew the people passing by. I liked the drawings so much, I thought, what the hell, why not make them a comic?
Yesterday, for the first time since spring hit, Meg and I went for a walk in Lakeview Cemetery. It’s my favorite place to walk in Cleveland Heights, close to the apartment, way better than any park, and massive enough that you can get lost. When it was warm and I had the day off, I’ve gone there to draw and read. (I also like to look at the names and the dates and make up stories about the families.) Next pretty weekend, we’re going to take some salami sandwiches and books over there and camp out for the day.
I didn’t have my camera or my sketchbook with me yesterday, so I drew the picture above from memory. Instead of a traditional marker in the center of the family plot, these folks had planted a magnolia tree. The flowers from the tree blossoms were falling, so the petals made a perfect, beautiful blanket of pink and white over the graves. It was the prettiest thing I’ve seen all year.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again.
—William Faulkner, “Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech”
I got my copy of George Saunder’s In Persuasion Nation in the mail a couple days ago, but I’ve found it really hard to get into, because I’ve already read most of the stories elsewhere. (“CommComm“, “Adams“, “Bohemians”, “The Red Bow,” “Christmas,” “93990,”…if you’ve got the Complete New Yorker you’re halfway there.) It’s like an album of previously released singles. The new website has a bunch of goodies on it, including a chapbook of non-fiction and an MP3 of Tony Danza (!) reading “The Barber’s Unhappiness.”
I’m also listening to Kevin Brockmeier’s THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD. He got the idea for the novel from the epigraph of one of my favorite books in high school: Jame Loewen’s LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME. Here’s a list of songs about death that Brockmeier likes, and the original story from the New Yorker.
I am still very excited for the new Walkmen album.
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