Artist/cartoonist Gary Panter signed his new book and gave a slideshow presentation at Domy Books last night. My buddy Adam has the last word:
Here are some good pictures of the same event at the Houston store.
Jessica Abel and Matt Madden were in town this weekend to promote Jessica’s La Perdida and Life Sucks, and their brand-new comics textbook collaboration, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures (great title). Yesterday they talked about the books (in that order) at Austin Books and Comics. There was a small crowd, not much A/C, and a keg of beer!
The biggest treat was that we got to buy a copy of the new textbook, which doesn’t officially come out for a week or so:
Some things I took away from their talk:
After she said that, when I was flipping through the book I found this cool example:
The book is formatted so that each type of creator can benefit from the lessons.
Since both Matt and Jessica are teachers at SVA, I asked them if they saw any pitfalls, teaching comics in the academy. Is there a chance that comics programs could turn out like MFA writing programs, with students turning out uniform, quiet, lit’ry, “workshopped” New Yorker types of short stories?
They both agreed that “it all comes down to the teachers,” and “if comics can’t withstand being taught in the academy, what kind of medium is it?”
I mentioned Lynda Barry’s new book as a great antidote to the “bad” kind of creative writing teaching, and Matt had a great reply:
(He was referring to Lynda’s art teacher in college, Marilyn Frasca.)
Overall, I think this book is extremely well done and worth checking out by anyone who’s interested in making comics—it’s probably the first book I’ve ever seen that could actually serve as the lone textbook for a comics-making class. I think it will sell like hotcakes, and, as Jessica and Matt hinted, we’ll definitely see a sequel focusing on “advanced” topics such as coloring and webcomics.
My complete notes from the talk, if anyone’s interested:
Thanks to Matt and Jessica for swinging down to Austin!
My buddy Tim and I went to see writer Michael Chabon (”Shea as in stadium, Bon as in Jovi”) at Bookpeople last night. There were at least 100 people there. I picked up a copy of his beautiful new non-fiction collection with a Jordan Crane-designed cover.
During the Q&A, Chabon remarked of one of his characters, “He was too verbose and too Jewish.”
When he signed my book to “Meg + Austin,” I said, “Meg is my wife—she really likes your stuff.”
And Chabon (who seems like a really nice guy, by the way) joked, “Oh, and you don’t think it’s so hot?”
And I blushed and restrained myself from quoting his Q&A.
(Brilliant storyteller, but dang, he can be long-winded!)
Here’s Tim and I hanging out beforehand:
Good times!
PS. Wonder Boys is one of the greatest movies ever made. Not joking. And it has a kick-ass soundtrack. Go watch it.
Went to see John Pierson interview Matt Stone, co-creator of South Park last night at the Austin City Limits studio on campus here at the University of Texas. Here’s a little write-up. I took some crummy sketchbook notes—could not for the life of me figure out how to draw him, so I just drew him as Kyle.
I have a kind of sentimental attachment to South Park: it came out the summer after my parents divorced, and my dad and I used to sit around in his little apartment and watch it and laugh our heads off. Humor when we needed it.
So, it was a real pleasure to hear him speak about the show, and his collaboration with Trey Parker. His thoughts were funny and intelligent.
Some highlights for me:
He listed three things that make his job the best job in Hollywood:
When you think about it, that’s the formula for any great job…
And again, when you think about it, that pretty much describes America.
Lots of other topics were discussed: Youtube, the original “The Spirit of Christmas” short, the Scientology Episode, the Britney Spears Show, lawyers, the 80s, the writer’s strike, Cannibal: The Musical!, and the genius Universal Studios Employee video.
Great, great event. Thanks to Janet for inviting me!
Last night we went over to the Austin City Limits studio to see a Q&A with David Simon, former newspaper reporter and creator of the TV show The Wire. John Pierson was the moderator, and he did a really great job— he asked Simon intelligent questions and then sat and listened while Simon gave intelligent answers.
Discussed topics: the decline of the newspaper industry, journalism and Homer Bigart (“his method: ‘Hi, I’m an idiot and I can’t talk…please help me’”), dumbass editors looking for lame stories about “Dickensian” children (”Pulitzer Sniffing”), Iraq, No Child Left Behind, stealing from Greek Tragedy, the drug war, jury nullification, creative writing students (“my god, you guys are an industry”), books he hasn’t read (Brothers Karamazov), the creative use of profanity, The America That Got Left Behind, and of course, Baltimore (“my favorite character”), and The Wire.
As usual, I doodled and took a lot of notes:
Really cool night, and awesome to finally see the Austin City Limits studio. Thanks to Janet for inviting us!
Links:
UPDATE:
I wanted to point out Amanda Marcotte’s post about the evening (relayed to me by Gerry Canavan):
Awards: A good excuse for fan wanking disguised as academic inquiry
It was a productive hour and a half of discussion, which is somewhat surprising, since they opened the floor to questions, which is usually an invitation for a bunch of assholes to pretend that everyone showed up to hear them talk instead of the speaker. There were a couple of people who asked questions where the question was a minor pretense for them to bloviate, but on the whole, the question askers were respectable and the questions were good.
It’s such a perfect, hilarious observation, a subject that Meg and I constantly complain about: too often Q&As are just a huge waste of time. This one wasn’t, but I drew a cartoon about it last night, anyways…I just didn’t post it. Here it is, now:
Tobias Wolff gave a fiction reading at UT tonight. He read from Old School, In Pharaoh’s Army, and a short story from a new collection, Our Story Begins, called “Her Dog,” in which a man has a conversation with his dead wife’s dog. I could not BELIEVE he read such a story, because Meg has been BEGGING me for a dog, and being the heartless bastard I am, I have refused her on logical grounds (they’re expensive, someone has to feed them, walk them, take care of them when you want to leave town, blah blah blah), the same positions the man in the story took with his wife, before she got a dog anyways, and he then declared the dog to be HER dog, and he would have nothing to do with caring for it, and then she dies, and then he’s stuck with this dog.
In other words, it was a story about a guilty man with his dead wife’s dog—read to a guilty man with a wife with no dog.
In other words, it hit close to home.
A good reading, only rivaled by the wonderful picnic dinner Meg fixed us to eat beforehand. Nice to finally get to see/hear him read, because he’s one of my favorite writers, and I’ve met a few of his students (Dan Chaon, George Saunders, Tom Perrotta), but never the man himself.
Afterwards, Meg came up with a new system for Q & A sessions: you submit questions on index cards before the reading, and then the writer pulls the questions out of a hat, reads them off, and answers them. This takes all the ego out of question-asking—you don’t get anyone trying to show off or flatter the writer, and people who might not feel comfortable asking a question in front of a live audience get a chance, too.
Crappy shot from my camera phone:
Yesterday Meg and I went to the Texas Book Festival. We were hoping to catch Shalom Auslander at the book signing tent, but he didn’t show up, so we walked downtown and got some Jimmy Johns and ate it on the lawn of the capital. Beautiful day. We finished up lunch and went to the House Chamber (which is pimped out beyond belief with the most comfortable leather chairs I’ve ever sat in) to listen to Tom Perrotta read:
After that, we went to see the always-fantastic-certified-genius George Saunders:
That last panel is a response to a (kinda lengthy) question I asked in the Q & A: “You’ve written about Charles Schulz and Peanuts before. David Michaelis’s new biography questions whether Schulz was as good of a family man as we’ve been led to believe. You strike me as a genuine family man, and I detect the great theme of work vs. family in your writing. So what do you think is the relation between being a good artist and being a great family man, and which do you think is more important?”
That night, we walked downtown to see a screening of Little Children at the newly-reopened Alamo Ritz. I love Tom Perrotta, but he really seemed uncomfortable in the setting:
All in all, it was a great day.
We drove out to Oberlin last night to see George Saunders read. I’d been looking forward to this for about a year, and I was praying to the weather gods that there wouldn’t be a giant snowstorm in Syracuse to keep him from getting to Cleveland. (He told us later that he was delayed, and missed a connecting flight, but it was an airline thing, not a weather thing.) Meg and I had a nice dinner at the Feve, and then we walked over to the Science Center. There weren’t any fun chemistry notes on the board in the lecture hall, but there was one of those little models with the wire and balls that you use to describe molecules…
Anyways. Big crowd. Lots of kiddies. First, he read the title story from In Persuasion Nation (here’s an MP3 from another reading). He said he wrote the story after watching a bunch of TV and realizing that a) advertising had began taking credit for everything good that happened in life (”Coke is Christ”) and b) that it had gotten really mean. Then he read from one of my favorites from Pastoralia, “The Barber’s Unhappiness” (here’s a hilarious MP3 of Tony Danza reading it). He said, “After you have daughters, you start realizing how misogynist the world is.” He wrote that story after watching a real old guy from the bus stop ogling women.
The readings were funny and warm and a little ornery. I think Meg laughed more than anybody, because up until that point, she’d only heard me read “Sea Oak” aloud to her in bed.
Then it was Q & A time. Somebody asked something about racial epithets. Somebody asked about motifs. He fielded questions like a patient, pro teacher, using them as springboards to talk about craft.
He joked that all the stories in CivilWarLand were the same: “Guy’s in a bad way. It gets worse.”
He joked about getting out from under the influence of Hemingway: “All my first stories went like this: Nick walked into the Wal-Mart.”
He did a hilarious high-voiced impression of Bill Buford’s method when he was fiction editor of the New Yorker: “Welll…I read a sentence…and then I like it…so I want to read another one!”
He said, “What you know is enough.”
He said good stories are “making language not suck.”
He plugged Don Barthelme’s great essay, “Not-Knowing.”
He described Joyce Carol Oates on her treadmill, thinking through her stories.
He recalled working in MS-DOS at his office, and using shift-F3 to avoid being caught writing on the job.
He outlined an editing method he uses with his students. First, he gives them 500 words of crap. Then they take a few minutes and cut 20 words. Then they take a few more minutes and cut 50 words. They do this a few more times until they have the crap whittled down to 200 words. The excercise is about finding voice in the appropriate “Prose Weight.”
Somebody asked, “What have you learned about the role of solitude in a writer’s life.” He said, “I never had any.”
Lucky me, I got the last question. I asked him, “What have you read lately that’s knocked you out?”
He said Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, two women he had never read before.
Then he started listing his old favorites. “Stuart Dybek?” I nodded. “Oh, you know him. How about Isaac Babel?” I nodded. “Stan Schwartz?” I shook my head. “Oh, no? That’s good, because I just made him up.” The room roared.
There was a long line outside to get books signed. We finally got to shake hands and say hello. “So, I take it you two are writers.” I said I was a cartoonist, and Meg was an architect. “Smart man!” he said. “You’re the guy who’s read everything.” I said, “No, only your reading list.”
Then we talked about Vonnegut. I mentioned the Amazon piece, and he said he’d re-worked the ending and that it would be in a new book soon. (I’m wondering if that new book is The Braindead Megaphone.) He said he just had a piece in the New York Observer proposing a National Vonnegut Day.
Then, we talked a little bit about Lynda Barry and how awesome she was. He said she came and taught at Syracuse and that she’d given him these really interesting articles on how the brain processes lyric poems, short stories, and jokes in the same way, as in, after you hear them, the brain runs back through them and gets its satisfaction from their shapeliness. She also told him about how they’d studied artists and creative people and figured out their patterns of childhood play. Next time I’m working, I’ll have to try to dig those up.
We said our goodbyes, and on the way home, Meg and I talked about how nice a guy he was, and how much we loved going to readings like this.
After scarfing down some tacos with about 50 soccer brats at the Chipotle across the street, last night we went to see Alison Bechdel read at the Joseph-Beth in Legacy Village. (Here’s Alison’s own blog of the event.) They had the reading hidden upstairs in this special conference room that had a fantastic projector. Then Harvey Pekar got up and gave an introduction that emphasized her skills as a writer:
Genuinely thrilled, Alison said, “That’s like the Grateful Dead introducing Phish.”
She started out by reading from the first chapter of Fun Home. Using Powerpoint, she projected the individual panels onto the projection screen while she read the narration from a script. (She let the speech bubbles inside the panels speak for themselves.) It was really soothing, and blowing the panels up several times bigger than their actual size you could see every hatch, every stroke, every variation in the inkwash. Meg said it was like seeing slides in architecture studio — you could see the way the imagery was working in a way different from reading the book.
“The thing about doing a graphic novel is that it’s a really physical process,” Alison said. “You have to know every square inch of the book. So there’s no way for me to talk about the book without showing it to you.”
It was truly using Powerpoint for good and not for evil, and I’m convinced now that Powerpoint is the key to presenting comix readings.
After she finished the chapter, she went into a slideshow detailing how she wrote the book.
What blew me away is how much writing leads her process. She used this panel from page 189 to illustrate:
She starts out by using Adobe Illustrator to type out her narration and dialogue into boxes. (She also includes a textual description of how the art will look.) Then she arranges the text around the page how she wants. At this stage, it looks very much like visual poetry. In her senior thesis, an undergrad colleague of mine, Elisabeth Price, reverse-engineered a Frank Miller page this way:
After getting the text just right, she rough pencils the panel on the typing paper.
The next step involves lots of photographic research — for this panel, she researched pictures of gay men from the period, fireworks, rooftops, water towers, and random people sitting on rooftops.
“I couldn’t have done this book without Google Image Search.”
She also takes digital pictures of herself in every pose that takes place in the panel.
“After this step,” she said, “the work is ninety-percent done.”
And yeah, the next steps are pretty standard comics stuff — tight pencil, then inking, erasing the pencil. Then the whole thing is scanned into Photoshop and cleaned up.
She did a gray inkwash for the shading that was later turned green by her publisher.
“It was weird because I never knew how it was all going to come together.”
Watching her describe her process, I thought once again about how I believe that comics is really collage — cobbling together layers of text and images. It’s the style that unifies the work — the style that convinces you that all this stuff is supposed to be in the same place.
After her process presentation, she read from chapter four, and then it was time for questions and answers.
She talked about her relationship with her mom, about the unexpected success of the book, and the bizarre mix of excitement over its success, and the burden of having her family story everywhere. Harvey chimed in by telling an anecdote about Robert Crumb and his reaction to Terry Zwigoff’s documentary about him.
“Crumb didn’t want to be bothered,” Harvey said. “He figured Terry would do the film, and everyone would forget about it.”
Then Harvey’s wife, Joyce Brabner, said: “Crumb’s first wife, Dana, has been trying to get a book published for years. It’s called, It Was My Life Too, Goddamnit!”
Afterwards, Alison signed books. Here’s a funny story about how much of a perfectionist she is:
She was going to draw a portrait of one of the women in line, but she said she didn’t have a pencil. “Does anybody have a pencil?” So I gave her one of those golf pencils you get at Ikea, and she did the sketch, then inked it.
I tried to draw her several times during the night, but just couldn’t get it right. Part of the problem was that I was caught off guard by her looks: from photos, she looks very, well, masculine and angular (butch hair, dark suit, glasses), but when you really start trying to draw her, looking close at her face, you realize that her lines are much softer in real life…
Meg and I, we’re always arguing about whether it’s more invasive to draw someone or take their picture. You certainly see a person much clearer by drawing them.
A lesson that maybe Alison has learned herself.
notes scribbled in the dark
Usually when I visit foreign cities and I’m feeling bewildered, I get the feeling that if I knew a local—if I only knew the inside scoop—then all these hidden treasures would be at my fingertips, and the city would open up and present itself as a sparkling gem of culture and fun.
I didn’t get that feeling in Akron. I got the feeling that what you see is what you get.
We headed down to the Blimp City Saturday night to see David Sedaris at the unique Akron Civic Theatre, which was built in 1929 and “fashioned after a Moorish castle featuring Mediterranean decor, including medieval carvings, authentic European antiques and Italian alabaster sculptures.” It’s one of the only remaining “atmospheric theaters” in the country, with “a twinkling star-lit sky and intermittent clouds moving across the horizon.”
During the preliminary book signing, Sedaris had asked two teenage girls who had driven in from Ann Arbor to introduce him, and he strolled out on stage in a tie, short and thin and looking young for 49.
“I’ve been writing animal stories lately, so I’m going to read one of those.”
He read a story about a ewe and a crow having a suburban mom conversation about child birth. Afterwards, he explained that one of his farmer neighbors in Normandy had told him that sheep have to be born in a barn, because otherwise crows will fly down and pluck out the newborn’s eyes. (You can guess at the story’s ending.)
Meghan guessed in the car that he’d read this week’s piece in the New Yorker, “The Understudy,” about a babysitter’s “brief reign of terror.” I was less than enthusiastic about the possibility, because I’d read the story early that morning and found it pretty mediocre. But I had forgotten Sedaris’s secret weapon: that high voice with the ghost remnants of a lisp. He started in, and the story, mediocre on the page, came to life.
Comedy is all about timing, and Sedaris is a pro at reading: he knows when to pause, when to take a sip of water for comedic effect. Even thought he’s a writer, audio—radio, readings, books on tape—is his medium, and it’s hard not to wonder if he’d be the “closest thing the literary world has to a rock star” if it weren’t for his voice.
He said he’d been asked to give the graduation speech at Princeton this year. “And I’m totally Ivy League struck. I have this belief that people who graduate from Harvard and Yale are simply better than the rest of us.” So he’d decided to take advantage of the 36 cities in 37 days tour and write a little bit of the speech every day and try it out on the audience that night. “When I was at Princeton, things were different,” he read, and the next page and a half centered around a joke about avoiding answering tough questions by asking several variations of the question, “Would you like to sleep with my sister?”
(Outrage is always part of comedy, but the woman behind me, instead of laughing, she let out this sound throughout the night, like “jsssh” or “jeez,” and I couldn’t tell if this was her way of laughing, or if she was TRULY outraged, or had no sense of humor, or what. It was the weirdest thing.)
The last story he read was a future New Yorker piece called “Choke On It.” “I always suggest my own titles,” he said, “but they rarely use them.” He went on to talk about how having work in the New Yorker “never gets old.” “Sometimes I’ll leave it open to the table of contents, and try to trick myself, like, ‘Oh, look there’s my name!’ But I think I’m also hoping my younger self will come in and see it, put down the bong, and go, Whoa!”
He dropped out of language class soon after he moved to France, and began answering everyone with the word “D’accord,” which in French roughly translates to “okay.” The story documented the adventures that ensued after he agreed to pretty much everything anyone said, and ended with him sitting in his underwear in a hospital waiting room.
“I feel unconnected in France,” he said. “And I don’t really mind it.”
Meghan leaned over to me and whispered, “The writer in exile.”
To end the reading, Sedaris read short, hilarious excerpts from his daily diary, and then unexpectedly plugged a short story collection by Jean Thompson called WHO DO YOU LOVE?
“Has anyone read this collection?” Silence. “Well, I love this book, and I have copies outside, so buy one of those instead of my books. The lack of applause at the mentioning of her name tells me that she could use the money.”
It’s been my experience that every reading has a theme that at some point reveals itself. The theme last night was writing. Almost every one of Sedaris’s stories had some meditation on writing, whether it was the kids keeping a log of the babysitter’s crimes in “The Understudy,” or Sedaris counting his blessings that not everyone in the world keeps a pocket notebook like him, in “Choke On It.” Auditory eloquence aside, you can tell what Sedaris really loves is writing.
“Sometimes when I find a passage of writing I really like, I type it out into my diary, hoping that somehow my fingers will memorize the movements of greatness, and I can just zone out and watch TV.”
As he strolled off the stage, I thought, this is our era’s Mark Twain: a gay, former housecleaner from North Carolina. Brilliant.
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Austin Kleon is a writer, cartoonist, and web designer living in Austin, Texas. More...
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