'Boy & Girl on Boxing' — The first comic I ever drew (for real this time)
This is the real first comic that I ever drew. I think I might have posted a different first comic recently, but that was just the first “Chalk Fooljob” comic. This is actually the first: I drew it on a notecard sometime in my junior year of college. I still have it somewhere. The characters names are “Boy” and “Girl.” “Boy” evolved into Chalk Fooljob, but Girl always is, always was and always will be “Girl.
7 tips from Schopenhauer on worthwhile writing
Arthur Schopenhauer’s essay “On Authorship and Style,” comes down to a simple idea: if you don’t have original ideas, don’t bother writing (We’ve visited this essay before). It’s not a comfortable message. And a writer who thinks she has the perspective to judge her ideas as historically significant has probably caught the hubris bug. If you’re trying to decide whether or not you have anything to offer world literature? Schopenhauer is willing to bet you don’t.
Not-very-broad broadsides
Yesterday, I discovered The Finsbury Park Manifesto. This morning, I ran across The Guerilla Poetics Project (thanks to WTWDAOA). Operatives for the project take poems printed using old school methods on high quality paper-stock and covertly place them inside books in bookstores for readers to later discover. It’s a way of tricking the masses into discovering the underground. If the job of the poet is to get the poetry into the hands of people by any means necessary, Guerilla Poetics is doing it.
Two writers’ workshops
Writers usually only seek feedback from editors and other writers. Maybe sometime from readers they are close to. I wonder if that’s had an effect on lit? Or maybe I’m just navel gazing? In Sudhir Venkatesh’s public reading at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, broadcasted on NPR’s Book Tour, he has an interesting quote about a part of his draft process for his most recent book, Gang Leader for a Day.
From idea to prototype
A thought only really lives until it has reached the boundary line of words; it then becomes petrified and dies immediately; yet it is as everlasting as the fossilized animals and plants of former ages. Its existence, which is really momentary, may be compared to a crystal the instant it becomes crystallized. As soon as a thought has found words it no longer exists in us or is serious in its deepest sense.
If it were an essay it would only be about one thing
Tonight, a friend of mine asked, “If it’s verse without any sort of rhyme scheme or meter, what makes it a poem and not prose?” We batted that one around a little bit, but since I’m only interested in definitions so far as they are useful for helping us find our way through life, the fine differences don’t concern me much. Then, a poet from Canada named Anne Carson came up.
Near disaster — or fear and loathing on the drawing board
I would never have drawn a page of comics if it hadn’t been for Dave Sim’s The Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing. Sim breaks down his whole drawing process in this book. I got so into it that I had to draw once I reached its end. Here it is: Sim wrote several times of different disasters that could befall a page of comics, especially using his favorite inking tool, The Hunt 102 crow quill.
Artist-Blog versus Artwork: One Night Only!
] Every artist should have a website, or at least a blog. This is a point I’ve been making to a friend of mine who’s trying to make her creative way in New York City. She’s doing this and that, meeting with little successes here and there, but it isn’t quite adding up to something whole yet. If she had a website, I argue, it could help people see her body of work.
A time of gaudy pens
The question is this: what do you go looking for when you read? Do you read for the sentences? Or do you read for the themes? Michel de Montaigne’s essay, “A Consideration Upon Cicero,” befuddled me. He criticizes Cicero and other famous writer-statesmen for leaving behind literature that they might be known for their writing. All the way through, I felt as though I must be missing something. I should mention that I don’t know Cicero, but this essay doesn’t really go into Cicero much at all.
I’m sure the sentiment is genuine…
[] …but it’s a little hard for me to take this seriously. A ballet about genocide? Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Some forms are not suited for some messages. This is one of the artist’s dilemmas. Behind the dancers, a special multi-media Second Life video plays out. The video is the creation of Human + Nature, the producer of socially conscious film and video that inspires its audience to work for a