Many people have expressed interest in originals, and so far, I’ve been really hesitant to give in: after all, newsprint deteriorates, and permanent marker, believe it or not, is not permanent. A print will far outlast the original. I’m not sure how one would preserve newsprint like this—a couple of museum folks are coming by this week, so maybe I’ll ask them. Who knows? It might even be interesting to watch the original slowly disintegrate on your wall.

I’m keeping the broadsheets intact now, just in case. They look like this:

pre-order the book for $10 |   buy prints for $20 |   become a fan for $0

see it bigger

Some notes doodled while watching the Chuck Jones documentary, Memories of Childhood.

* * *

I asked my mother, what should I teach my kids? She said don’t teach them anything, just give them lots of supplies.

—Cartoonist Tony Millionaire

I have been thinking about art supplies and parenting.

Chuck Jones spoke fondly of his wonderful mother, and quoted Gertrude Stein, “Artists don’t need criticism, they need love.” Jones’ father was physically abusive, and yet “he served a purpose,” as Jones recounted in his autobiography, Chuck Amuck!:

But—now listen—every time Father started a new business, he did three things: 1. He bought a new suit. 2. He bought acres of the finest Hammermill bond stationery, complete with the company’s letterhead. 3. He bought hundreds of boxes of pencils, also complete with the company name.

EVERY TIME FATHER’S
BUSINESS FAILED, HIS CHILDREN INHERITED
A FRESH LEGACY OF THE FINEST DRAWING
MATERIALS IMAGINABLE.

[…]

NOT ONLY THAT!

We were forbidden—actually forbidden—to draw on both sides of the paper. Because, of course, Father wanted to get rid of the stationery from a defunct business as soon as possible, and he brought logic to bear in sustaining his viewpoint: “You never know when you’re going to make a good drawing,” he said.

[…]

We also had perhaps the most vital environmental rule of all: parents who gave us the opportunity to draw, free from excessive criticism, and free from excessive praise—Mother, because she felt that children in the exploration of life could do no wrong, and Father…because he only wanted to get rid of that paper as soon as possible.

Turns out, access to art supplies is a big factor in the life of a young artist. Here’s the cartoonist Lynda Barry:

My mother was actually upset by me reading, and she hated for me to use up paper. I got screamed at a lot for using up paper. The only blank paper in the house was hers, and if she found out I touched it she’d go crazy. I sometimes stole paper from school and even that made her mad. I think it’s why I hoard paper to this day. I have so much blank paper everywhere, in every drawer, on every shelf, and still when I need a sheet I look in the garbage first. I agonize over using a “good” sheet of paper for anything. I have good drawing paper I’ve been dragging around for twenty years because I’m not good enough to use it yet. Yes, I know this is insane.

There’s also a “good cop/bad cop” parenting element that seems to pop up. Here’s Milton Glaser:

In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, “Prove it.” He didn’t think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother’s belief to overcome my father’s resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance. It’s much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents.

Ample supplies, a resistant father, and an encouraging mother. Sure, it’s Freudian, but I like it.

And God help the aspiring artists with perfect childhoods!

Alex Gregory for the New Yorker:

see it bigger

I just finished reading Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

In the spring of 1957, when he was eighty-one years old, C. G. Jung undertook the telling of his life story. At regular intervals he had conversations with his colleague and friend, Aniela Jaffe, and collaborated with her in the preparation of the text based on these talks. On occasion, he was moved to write entire chapters of the book in his own hand, and he continued to work on the final stages of the manuscript until shortly before his death on June 6, 1961.

A good bit of this book blew my mind, but especially this part:

I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors.

[...]

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.

[...]

I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I care out rough answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls.

[...]

The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me.

We are a collage—a remix—of our ancestors. We have spiritual DNA, as well as physical, and our lot in life is to answer the questions posed by the people who came before us…

Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. Why describe it when dozens of reviewers already have:

Bageant mixes a reporter’s keen analysis, a storyteller’s color, and a native son’s love of his roots in this absorbing dissection of America’s working poor. Returning to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, after 30 years of life among the elite journalistic class, Bageant sought to answer the question of why the working poor vote for Republicans in apparent opposition to their own interests. (Booklist)

This is a great book. Like Drew Westen’s The Political Brain, it sets out to explain why democrats just can’t capture the hearts and votes of working class America.

There was a particular passage that I thought synced up nicely with Barack Obama’s recent “race” speech, where Obama said:

As imperfect as [Reverend Wright] may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

The passage from Bageant quote concerns religion, but it has the same theme—your people are your people, and they’re a part of you, no matter what:

Only another liberal raised in a fundamentalist clan can understand what a strange, sometimes downright hellish circumstance it is — how such a family can despise everything you believe in, see you as a humanist instrument of Satan, yet still love you and be right there for you when your back goes out or a divorce shatters your life. How they can never fail to invite you to the family’s Thanksgiving dinner.

It must be plain that I do not find much conversational fat to chew around the Thanksgiving table. Politically and spiritually, my family and I may be said to be dire enemies. Love and loathing coexist. There is talk but no communication. At times it seems we are speaking to one another through an unearthly veil, wherein each party knows it is speaking to an alien. There is a sort of high, eerie, mental whine in the air. This is the sound of mutually incomprehensible worlds hurtling toward destiny, passing with great psychological friction, obvious to all yet acknowledged by none.

After a lifetime of identity conflict, I have come to accept that these are my people — by blood, even if not politically or spiritually. I have prayed with them, mourned with them, and celebrated their weddings. I share their rude tastes and humor, and I am marked by the same fundamentalist God-instilled self-loathing. No matter how much I may change or improve my condition, I cannot escape their pathos. I go forward, yet I remain. I wait anxiously and strive for change, for relief from what feels like an increased stifling of personal liberty, beauty, art, and self-realization in America. They wait in spooky calmness for Jesus.

Highly recommended. Thanks to Jessa Crispin for the tip.

Links:

• Buy it on Amazon
• Joe Bageant’s site

Have not had time to see much of this town: but like it as as far as I have gone. Spent until 4:30 today on trains. You Kiddies be good while Daddy is away for tomorrow is Mother’s Day. Be especially good to Mother.

- Daddy

Eleanor this is the seat of learning for the state of Texas. They have some wonderful schools here. The most friendly people that I ever saw.

- Daddy

Sister this is a pretty country. But a lot of Nationalitys [sic].

- Daddy

Here are some pictures of the Kleons that my Aunt Connie gave me this weekend:

This book is the fruit of tape-recorded conversations held in my country house in Springs, East Hampton, during the summer of 1974 and the autumn of 1977, with my friend Aldo Buzzi, who later made a careful selection of all the transcriptions and arranged them in four chapters.”
—Saul Steinberg

Reflections and Shadows is a short book, but full of little gems. Here are a few of them:

Saul Steinberg holding his eight-year-old self by the hand.

* * *

On Memory:

“Nothing that has been deposited in the memory is lost. Memory is a computer that all one’s life goes on accumulating data which are not always used, since man is often like an ocean liner that sets sail with only a single cabin occupied. We ought to be able to use this huge accumulation of data continually, keep it functioning, combine and multiply its elements and reintroduce them into the circuit of our thoughts….Maybe I’ll have the good fortune to find again other things that now seem forgotten. I’d like to be able to go back and see all the things that at the time I stored away without perceiving them, follow myself at the age of ten and judge, with the mind of today, the conditions under which I lived, thus discovering what, at that time, had been deposited in the computer without my knowing it.”

On Drawing Family Members:

“Nowadays I draw uncles and aunts from photographs and I recognize (looking at them for the first time as real people) parts of myself, an ear, an eye. Archaeology!”

A Definition of Family:

“…people I had neither invented nor found for myself.”

On Leaving the Past to Memory:

“[There] are places that don’t belong to geography but to time. And the memory of these places of sadness, of suffering, but above all of great emotions, is spoiled by seeing them again. It’s better to leave certain things in peace, just the way they are in memory: with the passage of time they become the mythology of our lives. I haven’t even wanted to see certain people again with whom I had been more or less friendly in terms of time and place: schoolmates, childhood companions. You can’t resume a dialogue that never was a real dialogue but rather a temporary complicity, the kind of complicity established among people occupying the same compartment in a train.”

On Americans and Food:

“In America you don’t ask passersby to point out a good restaurant, as you do in Italy or France. People don’t understand what a good restaurant is, because here one goes to a restaurant not to eat but to have a good time. To answer, they’d have to know why you want to go: to pick up a girl, to take the family and have an unforgettable evening with music and soft lights, to gorge yourself or have a quick snack. They wouldn’t even be able to say whether some diner is good or bad: a diner is a diner.”

On the Jukebox:

“…built according to the laws of the Catholic or Chinese or Hindu altar, a magical object to be worshipped because all good things come from it: music, dance, love, and joy.”

On drawing from life:

“It’s hard to do a portrait. You must first spend a critical moment in which you quickly — if you’re lucky — discard all the commonplaces about the subject of the drawing. More difficult than inventing is giving up accumulated virtues. The things you discovered yesterday are no longer valid. It’s impossible to find anything new without first giving something up.

There’s a moral in this. It’s stinginess that holds us back, especially when we’re not only enamored of what we’ve discovered but also convinced it’s good. There are those who, in working from life, continually use the baggage they picked up yesterday; they work from life without really looking, without working from life.”

I think it’s no coincidence that I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick on the plane ride to and from Texas. Meg and I were busy all week planting the seeds for a new extended family in Austin, and more or less, that’s what the book is about — extended families as a cure for loneliness. It might be one of Vonnegut’s key philosophies, and Vonnegut would recycle it over and over again in later speeches, books, and conversation. This bit is from the prologue, which is probably better than the rest of the pages of the book combined. Yes, get Slapstick, if only for the prologue:

[H]uman beings need all the relatives they can get–as possible donors or receivers not necessarily of love, but of common decency.

. . .

When we were children in Indianapolis, Indiana, it appeared that we would always have an extended family of genuine relatives there. Our parents and grandparents, after all, had grown up there with shoals of siblings and cousins and uncles and aunts. Yes, and their relatives were all cultivated and gentle and prosperous, and spoke German and English gracefully.

. . .

They were all religious skeptics, by the way.

. . .

They might roam the wide world over when they were young, and often have wonderful adventures. But they were all told sooner or later that it was time for them to come home in Indianapolis, and to settle down. They invariably obeyed–because they had so many relatives there.

There was good things to inherit, too, of course–sane businesses, comfortable homes and faithful servants, growing mountains of china and crystal and silverware, reputations for honest dealing, cottages on Lake Maxinkuckee, along whose eastern shore my family once owned a village of summer homes.

. . .

But the delight the family took in itself was permanently crippled, I think, by the sudden American hatred for all things German which unsheathed itself when this country entered the First World War, five years before I was born.

Children in our family were no longer taught German. Neither were they encouraged to admire German music or literature or art or science. My brother and sister and I were raised as though Germany were as foreign to us as Paraguay.

We were deprived of Europe, except for what we might learn of it at school.

We lost thousands of years in a very short time–and then tens of thousands of American dollars after that, and the summer cottages and so on.

And our family became a lot less interesting, especially to itself.

So–by the time the Great Depression and a Second World War were over, it was easy for my brother and my sister and me to wander away from Indianapolis.

And, of all the relatives we left behind, not one could think of a reason why we should come home again.

We didn’t belong anywhere in particular any more. We were interchangeable parts in the American machine.