Austin Kleon – Page 600

ANOTHER PAGE FROM THE SKETCHBOOK

Tuesday, January 3, 2006

WOMAN’S WORLD BY GRAHAM RAWLE

Monday, January 2, 2006

Graham Rawle is a collage artist and writer. His latest book, Woman’s World, is a novel created entirely from fragments of text cut out of early 1960s women’s magazines. Meghan read about him in the latest issue of I.D. magazine:

First, Rawle wrote a straightforward novel. Then, Photoshop be damned, he used scissors and glue to clip words and phrases from the magazines. He catalogued the clippings thematically, scrapbook-style, in what amounted to 11 volumes of starter text. Finally, he went back and married the two, translating the original narrative using only the fragments he had collected, so that simple sentences like “What nonsense!” became “That’s all tosh and table margarine.” For Rawle, merging writing and design meant thinking obliquely about both. “Doing collage, you have to make do with what you’ve got,” he says. “When I make pictures, if I can’t find the right hat then I cut up a photo of a tomato.”

This is the kind of thing I want to do with my newspaper blackout comics poems. Outstanding.

A STORY=IMAGINARY NUMBER?

Monday, January 2, 2006

From a great New Yorker article about Philip Pullman:

Near the end of “The Golden Compass,” Lord Asriel asks Lyra to bring him a copy of the Bible, and he reads her a passage from Genesis….“But it en’t true, is it?” Lyra asks of the story. “Not true like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn’t really an Adam and Eve” Lord Asriel tells her to think of the story as an “imaginary number, like the square root of minus one.” Its truth might not be tangible, but you can use it to calculate “all manner of things that couldn’t be imagined without it.” The metaphor is not just cunning; it helps explain why Pullman, a champion of science, writes in the fantastic mode.

Pullman ALSO did the illustrations for the Dark Materials trilogy. He talks about the process here, and you can view the illustrations here and here.

CHAUTAUQUA NEW YEAR

Sunday, January 1, 2006

For New Year’s, our friends were nice enough to invite us up to their place on Lake Chautauqua in western New York.

“You can stay in the boathouse,” they said.

After two hours on the highway, they drove us to this boarded-up shanty.

“Here’s the boathouse!” they said.

Then they laughed at our horrified faces and drove us to the real boathouse.

On the way, they told us “Chautauqua” means “gunny-sack-tied-in-the-middle” in Indian.

Stupid Indians, I thought. Who knows what a gunny sack looks like?

It occured to me over breakfast that this would be a great place to write a book. I could sit at my desk and stare at the lake, white as a virgin sheet of paper, just waiting to be defiled with ink.

Here, some ice fisherman are defiling the lake with drills.

What a pretty scene for a defiling!

The Famous Fish Platter at GUPPY’S is outstanding. There’s a reason it’s famous: the fish is flavorful, and the french fries are crispy, with just the right amount of seasoning.

The decor was tartar sauce on top of the fish: above our table was a Christmas wreath decorated with a golden Budweiser sign.

It was my kind of restaurant.

No New Year is complete without a game of Drunk Scrabble. Drunk Scrabble is played after at least four glasses of wine. Proper nouns, abbreviations, and acronyms are all welcome and encouraged. Proper verbs, are included, too, like Google, even though it’s damned near impossible to end up with two Gs and two Os.

I am pleased to note that I came up with the evening’s top score: a whopping 33 points for “feat.” (The F was on a double-letter score, and the T ended up on a triple-word score.)

Happy New Year!