Austin Kleon

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RE-IMAGINING FROM MEMORY

All memory has to be reimagined. For we have in our memories micro-films that can only be read if they are lighted by the bright light of the imagination.
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics Of Space

Something weird happens when we try to recreate cultural artifacts from memory: the result has less to do with the artifact, and more to do with us.

A year or two ago I got a Bonnie Raitt song stuck in my head. “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” I had the day off and I was bored, so I decided to sit down with my guitar and try to record the song from memory. I didn’t want to bother learning the lyrics or listen to the original. I just wanted to roll tape and see what happened.

On playback, it was the same song, but it wasn’t. The chords were “off,” and I’m pretty sure I left out a bridge. It’s like the filter of my memory took out the musical complexity and stripped it down to its bones. Left only a “cartoon” of the song…

dirty projectors rise above

Here’s the story behind the amazing Dirty Projectors album, Rise Above:

[Dirty Projectors man man Dave] Longstreth went to help his parents move out of the house he grew up in. Among his youthful artifacts was the cassette case from the Black Flag album Damaged. This brought back all sorts of memories— Black Flag was one of Longstreth’s first loves— but the tape itself was missing. So, like the character in the Jorge Luis Borges story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ who sets out to recreate Don Quixote line by line from memory, Longstreth went to the nearest Guitar Center, purchased the cheapest cassette four-track he could find, and embarked on recasting Damaged from memory, without re-listening to a single note or reading any lyrics. The ten songs that make up Rise Above (titled after one of the tracks on Damaged) stem from these four-track demos, recorded at his parents’ house on an acoustic guitar.

“I had to completely inhabit my early adolescence, the time when I used to listen to Damaged,” Longstreth has said. “[I was] trying to access the memory crystals stored from when I loved it back in middle school.”

The beauty of Rise Above is that Longstreth used his memory of the original Black Flag songs as a starting point to create “new” songs. “I wanted to see if I could make this album…not as an album of covers or an homage per se, but as an original creative act.” It was his imagination that made them great.

It frees us to have constraints. I’m starting to believe that the idea that the artist can should sit down and create something “new” is a paralyzing delusion. We can only create a collage of our influences, our memories—filtered through our imagination.

By re-interpreting these artifacts, we come up with something that is uniquely our own.

Ivan Brunetti has a drawing exercise (link long dead — try his excellent book, Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice) where he has his students doodle cartoon characters quickly, from memory:

When drawing characters quickly, from memory, one can be quite inaccurate, almost as if one is inventing new characters, and these “mistakes” can serve as the basis for new character designs. This lets the students see their own styles more clearly. A page full of these doodles can help the student discern certain qualities that are consistent within their set of drawings. These qualities are a clue as to what makes one’s particular “visual handwriting” different or unique, and these should be embraced by the student.

The idea that by drawing from memory “copies” of other work, we can somehow sharpen our own sense of what makes us unique! I love it.

Links:

THE TWELVE DEVICES OF PEANUTS

So-called creative people understand better than most that there is nothing new under the sun. Working with boulders of granite, with empty stages, with blank paper, they are credited with making something out of nothing, but that isn’t exactly what they do. All art is derived from what is in actuality a remarkably finite human experience. Whatever the medium, the creative person’s task is to interpret an essentially unchanging reality, a dog-eared reality pondered by Homer and Mel Brooks and everyone in between. The artist succeeds if he or she can present something familiar from an unfamiliar angle.”

— Rheta Grimsley Johnson

While everyone else is reading David Michaelis’s new biography, Schulz and Peanuts, I’ve decided to wait and ask for it for Christmas. Instead, I’m reading Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s underrated and unfortunately out-of-print 1989 “authorized” biography, Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz. People have called the book “innocuous” and “flattering”, but I think it deals with Schulz’s depression in a very straightforward and explicit manner, and the writing is really great. Worth tracking down.

Chapter 6 of the book is dedicated to Schulz’s “12 devices”—the twelve ideas that Schulz considered essential to the success of Peanuts:

1. The Kite-eating tree.

01

2. Schroeder’s music

02

I was looking through this book on music, and it showed a portion of Beethoven’s Ninth in it, so I drew a cartoon of Charlie Brown singing this. I thought it looked kind of neat, showing these complicated notes coming out of the mouth of this comic-strip character, and I thought about it some more, and then I thought, ‘Why not have one of the little kids play a toy piano?’

—Schulz

charlie brown and schroeder whistling

3. Linus’s blanket

03

4. Lucy’s psychiatry booth

04

5. Snoopy’s doghouse

05

In the beginning, Snoopy actually slept in his doghouse, and a three-quarter view that worked in perspective was the readers’ most familiar angle….The emergence of Snoopy’s doghouse as Grand Device centered not on actual depictions of the humble abode but on allusions to its fantastic contents…the only view the reader is ever given is a left side view. Yet as its graphic depiction became severely restricted, its function became limitless.

—R.G.J.

6. Snoopy himself

06

7. The Red Baron

07

8. Woodstock

08

9. The baseball games

11

10. The football episodes

12

Besides losing, the running (and falling) gag is a pure example of another element that has worked so well for Schulz: repetition…Nothing else in Peanuts is so mechanically repetitious as the football joke….One newspaper editor canceled Peanuts, complaining that the author did the same things over and over. He was forced to reinstate the comic strip, with an apology, when his readers set up a postal howl.

—R.G.J.

11. The Great Pumpkin

09

12. The little red-haired girl

10

Hank Williams’s plaintive ballad “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You” spurred the inclusion of the little red-haired girl in Peanuts. After listening to the song over and over again, Schulz was inspired to include in his cast of characters the unrequiting lover….The littler red-haired girl has never been depicted…and he believes she never will be.

—R.G.J.

TNT EN AMERIQUE BY JOCHEN GERNER

tntameriquecover.jpg

Matt Madden was kind enough to clue me in to the existence of Jochen Gerner’s TNT En Amerique — a blackout comic that takes Herge’s Tintin In America and reduces the speech bubbles to phrases and the colors to graphic symbols. The project came about through Gerner’s experience with OuBaPo — the comics equivalent of the group exploring writing with constraints, OuLiPo.

Here’s a look at one of the pages:

tntenamerique.jpg

Gerner says of his work (obviously a translation from French):

The main interest for me of the comic strip is the infinite possible links between text and image: a system of representation continually confronting, in a kind of alchemy, text and picture….The idea “TNT en Amérique” sprang from…OuBaPo, from exercises, experiments. I try to find new reading perspectives. I dismantle a given material to make something else of it…. I bought…old copies of “Tintin en Amérique”. [I] worked directly on the printed editions by cutting the pages one by one and covering them thickly with black ink….I did not see this book as a “technical feat” but as the discovery of a secret passage , of a dark track followed to the end.

I can’t get a close enough look at the pages to really tell exactly what’s going on, but it’s got something to do with violence and America: Gerner goes on about how the page became “night” with unblackened color emerging like neon signs from American life. Here’s a few page spreads from the publisher’s site:

tntenameriquepages.jpg

James Kochalka has said of this kind of thing, “remixes destroy the original comic art, but create something new and wonderful from it. Like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, destruction equals creation.” I dig it.

I’d write more about OuBaPo and OuLiPo, but we’re trying to pack up for our big Austin apartment-hunting trip. For more on my thoughts about writing and restraints, see these past posts: “Mathematical Storytelling,” “A Humument,” and my “Newspaper Blackout Poems.”

Big thanks to Matt for the tip! Be sure to check out his really cool book, 99 Ways To Tell A Story: Exercise In Style, and his blog.

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