My latest typewriter interview is with cartoonist Tom Hart.
Storing up images
I love reading more than one book at a time and letting the books talk to each other. I love promiscuous reading. Here’s Octavia Butler on her practice:
I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.
I’m currently dipping in and out of two books: 1) Harold Gatty’s Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass — a 1958 wayfinding manual and Christmas gift from my wife — and 2) Tom Hart’s How To Say Everything, material Tom’s been working on for the past decade, but just recently published in book form.
They compliment each other beautifully on the subject of storing up images. Here’s Gatty:
There is something which all the greatest artists and writers, naturalists and scientists, voyagers and explorers, poets and pioneers, share. It is an interest in the external world and the ability to contribute something creative to human life in this world by means of taking parts of the world to pieces and putting them all together again. The ability to observe, and the ability to see the little things that seem trivial at first, may become amazingly important and meaningful. Out of little observations huge ideas may grow; and if a mind, made receptive by training in the use of the senses, can store away a mass of observations, the time will come when the whole collection can be unrolled, connected together as a great novel is planned, in a compelling pattern that tells us something new.
And here’s Hart, quoting Stanislavski, in his chapter, “Creating A Store”:
You must be constantly adding to your store. For this purpose you draw… principally upon your own impressions, feelings and experiences. You also acquire material from life around you, real and imaginary, from reminiscences, books, art, science, knowledge of all kinds, from journeys, museums and above all from communication with other human beings.
In both of these contexts the word “store” refers to stocking up or keeping a supply for future use, like a squirrel, but it also conjures retail associations in my brain. I’m reminded of Allen Ginsberg, in “A Supermarket in California,” who, dreaming of Walt Whitman, wandering around, looking at the moon, stops into the neon supermarket, “shopping for images.”
That seems to be so much of what I’m always doing — shopping for images — adding to the store, stocking up for the future…
Top image: Drawing of a brain by Jules (3)
CREATIVE WRITING 101
WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN
Another one cut from the book.
The cartoonist Tom Hart (Hutch Owen) has a fantastic blog called “Cartooning Like You Mean It,” and he’s been posting recently about mark-making, poetry, and drama. Here’s a clip from his post, “Drama vs. Poetry“:
Drama is the manipulation of characters and events in opposition with each other. In its most extreme, it is superficial and distancing: tired action movies about good guys and bad guys. In it’s best examples, characters are deeply drawn and communicate, questioning and exploring the themes of the drama both in their behaviors and thoughts.
Poetry I would argue is the single image designed to provoke or evoke other impressions and ideas in the mind and inner eye of the audience. Poetic image is created using the images of our society: people, places, and time etc. At its most extreme and superficial, it is cloying, simplistic, Hallmark cards and childish posters. At its most astute, it uses hints of drama to offer up enough action, enough motion and opposition between the characters and other elements to suggest worlds within the audience and to allow meditative space within them.
(Emphasis mine.)
I’ve often thought of my poems as little scenes from stories told in images made out of words. In fact, when I started making them, almost four years ago, they began as writing exercises to generate ideas for short stories. (Short stories are what they teach you to write in college, and so I tried to write them.)
In the book, Meg and I tried to string the poems together in an order that suggested a rise and fall, a sense of time and place, of movement…of some kind of narrative.
We’ll find out in another year whether we succeeded. The new sale date is February 9, 2010. A year from two days ago.
Who even knows where we’ll all be by then?
(Thanks to Derik Badman for pointing out the Hart quote.)