inspired by our lovely weather…
here’s Lynda Barry’s interview where she talks about her process that i’m trying to rework…
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CONCENTRATE!
This is the first in what I hope to be several exercises hatched under the influence of Lynda Barry. See, Lynda keeps a stack of index cards with different words on them, and every morning she gets up very early, gets her ink ready, dips her brush, and pulls out a word, and whatever that word is, she uses the image it conjures to start up a piece of writing. Whenever she can’t think of how to start out, she uses the words, “It was a time when…” and goes from there. And because she’s using the top of her brain to make the letters look neat with the brush, the bottom of her brain can work on the good stuff. Oh, and she can’t erase what she’s written. She wrote all of CRUDDY this way.
To try it out, I opened the dictionary, and the first word I looked at was “juice.” I started out with a big rectangular block of black, and started erasing…
…death to Microsoft Word!
WHOEVER GOD TOSSED YOU TO
“After all the things that happened, described and undescribed, if I told you I still loved the father would you understand it? How there was a wire of love running inside of me that I just could not find to pull? It was the side effect of being someone’s child, anyone’s child, whoever God tossed you to.”
—Lynda Barry’s CRUDDY, Chapter 24
“Birdseed” is turning into a tiny epic. As long as something makes Meg laugh, then I know I’m on the right track…
This morning she had to drive to Oberlin to consult a co-op about greening a house, so I went with her. In the bookstore, I read the first pages of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos For the New Millenium, his last lectures he wrote before he died, and Barry Hannah’s second novel, Ray. Both are authors I’ve set aside for studying. But where to begin?
I decided not to buy the bargains, and went into the coffee shop next door to read Cruddy. Then I spilt coffee all over. It might’ve been the caffeine, might’ve been the book.
On the way out of town, Meg and I talked about how we want to have a little house in a small college town, a highway trip away to a city with some culture.
One day. Happy weekend, everybody.
FOR ALL ITS HEARTLAND GOODNESS AND ROMANCE
I’m still reeling from meeting Lynda Barry and soaking up a little bit of the crazy energy she exudes. (Best was that I got a nice e-mail from her, and the subject line was: KICK ASS DRAWING MAN!) I was reading an old interview from a while back, and somebody asked, “do you have any advice for young people?” And this was her answer.
JIMMY CORRIGAN, MEET MADAME BOVARY
The Sunday NYTimes came a day late to Circleville this Easter, so Meg, Mom, and I read it over a breakfast of leftovers. I was reading what looks to be the last installment of Ware’s Building Stories series, and Mom said, “What do you think of that?” And I said, “well, I read it for the technique, but the story lines are pretty boring.” And Mom said, “That’s what I thought, but I was afraid that you liked it.” Then she explained to me that she found it really hard to read, after a lifetime of teaching kids left-to-right, up-and-down. So I told her that I thought everybody who comes to his work basically has to re-teach themselves to read. And she said, “Oh, good. I thought I was the only one.”
THEN I was reading in the Book Review about Flaubert, and I had remembered that somewhere (?) someone had suggested that Jimmy Corrigan would make a great companion to Madame Bovary on a reading list. About Flaubert: “Sentences were laid as carefully as fuses. Progress was excruciatingly slow.” And: “The romantic in him wanted to soar above it all, to write a book of pure music, “a book about nothing,” a book held together only by the “internal force of its style.”
That’s all I’ve got. I’m going to grab my old copy of Madame Bovary to take back to Cleveland for further rumination.
Tonight we’re going to drive straight up to Oberlin to see Lynda Barry. I’m really interested to see what a fiction “reading” by a comics writer looks/sounds like. Since I always bring my sketchbooks to these things, I’m going to use Brandy Agerbeck’s graphic facilitations and Alison Bechdel’s recent renderings of a visit to the Center for Cartoon Studies as inspiration. (Check out the program at CCS, by the way. That’s what I’d like my MFA studies to look like. If only CCS had funding and accrediation…)
If you want some more reading, check out Etgar Keret in the funny pages, and Sammy Harkham’s “Black Death” from CRICKETS #1 as a webcomic.