THE SUITABILITY OF A SON
Our lease was up in July, so Meg and I moved into her parents’ house to save a month’s rent for our upcoming move. We’re leaving a ton of our furniture in Cleveland, and we’ve outfitted Meg’s old room as a guest suite. As a result, I have one of the nicest workspaces ever — my blue desk now looks out onto the lovely woods, with the birds chirping.
They also have an NYTimes subscription, so you might see more blackout poems as the month progresses.
OFF TO AUSTIN
Me and the wife, we’re off to our future home of Austin, Texas to look for apartments. We’ll be there until next Monday. If y’all are from the area and y’all want to grab a drink, shoot me an e-mail…I’ll be checkin’ it. If you have any suggestions for stuff to do, apartments to rent, or possible jobs for me, send those too. We’ll take whatever we can get!
By the way, the New Yorker has two Austin-related articles this week. One is about why the archives of so many writers end up at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas. (On my list of places to visit.) The other is Sasha Frere-Jones reviewing the new album by Spoon, one of my favorite bands in the world, who just happen to be Austin-based.
Wish us luck!
TNT EN AMERIQUE BY JOCHEN GERNER
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:
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:
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.
MR. MILLIONAIRE
This was a weird one for me: I actually used a complete article (the NYtimes article on Tony Millionaire), and then pasted all the parts together to make one looong poem:
So…the 3-day weekend approaches. I think we’re going to sleep in a bunch, read, draw, maybe hit the art museum, walk the cemetery, then go see Harvey and Joyce at the Coventry Unitarian Church (Sat 8PM), and then celebrate Meg’s birthday on Monday.
Have a good one!
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