let's pretend I posted this yesterday kthx
Last night I went to see a great talk by Lynda Barry and Matt Groening, about their long friendship, their comics, and Matt's work on The Simpsons & etc. I love them so much!
(Also it kept me out late and resulted in my first missing of my goal to post daily. Rrrr. Then again being a MiFu is part of the gestalt of WriSoMiFu so maybe I'm doing it RIGHT. ANYWAY.)
Although Matt Groening is more well-known (I think), Lynda Barry is one of my heroes. I discovered her comics in The Reader when I was a teenager and fell in love with her storytelling style, her economy and silliness and sadness. I grew up in a place a lot like the ones she wrote about, and I felt a connection to her, and to the idea that the badness of that can be overcome, and that art can make beauty out of everything, even the worst things.
I think Lynda Barry is best known best for her "Ernie Pook" comic series, which used to run at Salon.com, but her early comics are so hysterical, just ridiculous and laugh out loud funny. I love them in the same way I love Jane Austen's juvenalia, because you can feel the vibrant mind that wrote them, and how much she (both of them, actually) must have laughed when putting them to paper--you can't not fall in love with a person who shares with you what they find funny, and you can't not laugh.
(It's a separate topic but if you've never read Jane Austen's juvenalia and/or if you somehow have formed the impression she's stuffy, or uptight, or some kind of pre-Victorian killjoy [editor's note: impossible!], I highly recommend it. If you cannot love her after reading her 17-year old goofiness, you may have a dried-up old sponge where your heart is supposed to be.)
Something Lynda Barry said last night that I'm still thinking about was this: She asked the audience to say their first phone number out loud, on the count of three. And everyone did it, and she repeated it once more, and then she said, "Now, say your phone number from three phone numbers ago." And there was a mass crinkling of brows, including hers, and this was her point: Your first phone number is what she called "an image"--it has a quality of realness, it speaks to you and is effortless. The other phone number, it's work, it's thinking. But once you have that image, that thing that is effortless and real, that makes you go :D when you say it, then you have the substance of art--and it doesn't matter if you paint it or write it in a poem or make a comic out of it. It's the image and its realness that give art its power, more than the form in which it's presented.
IDK, I found that interesting and thought-provoking. I think it's easy with writing (with any art I'm sure) to get caught up in the mechanics, once you're into it, and to lose the fluidity and realness of the original image. The idea of going back, cutting and starting again on a few places in the story where I feel like I've overworked it is actually kind of exciting to me today.
(Also it kept me out late and resulted in my first missing of my goal to post daily. Rrrr. Then again being a MiFu is part of the gestalt of WriSoMiFu so maybe I'm doing it RIGHT. ANYWAY.)
Although Matt Groening is more well-known (I think), Lynda Barry is one of my heroes. I discovered her comics in The Reader when I was a teenager and fell in love with her storytelling style, her economy and silliness and sadness. I grew up in a place a lot like the ones she wrote about, and I felt a connection to her, and to the idea that the badness of that can be overcome, and that art can make beauty out of everything, even the worst things.
I think Lynda Barry is best known best for her "Ernie Pook" comic series, which used to run at Salon.com, but her early comics are so hysterical, just ridiculous and laugh out loud funny. I love them in the same way I love Jane Austen's juvenalia, because you can feel the vibrant mind that wrote them, and how much she (both of them, actually) must have laughed when putting them to paper--you can't not fall in love with a person who shares with you what they find funny, and you can't not laugh.
(It's a separate topic but if you've never read Jane Austen's juvenalia and/or if you somehow have formed the impression she's stuffy, or uptight, or some kind of pre-Victorian killjoy [editor's note: impossible!], I highly recommend it. If you cannot love her after reading her 17-year old goofiness, you may have a dried-up old sponge where your heart is supposed to be.)
Something Lynda Barry said last night that I'm still thinking about was this: She asked the audience to say their first phone number out loud, on the count of three. And everyone did it, and she repeated it once more, and then she said, "Now, say your phone number from three phone numbers ago." And there was a mass crinkling of brows, including hers, and this was her point: Your first phone number is what she called "an image"--it has a quality of realness, it speaks to you and is effortless. The other phone number, it's work, it's thinking. But once you have that image, that thing that is effortless and real, that makes you go :D when you say it, then you have the substance of art--and it doesn't matter if you paint it or write it in a poem or make a comic out of it. It's the image and its realness that give art its power, more than the form in which it's presented.
IDK, I found that interesting and thought-provoking. I think it's easy with writing (with any art I'm sure) to get caught up in the mechanics, once you're into it, and to lose the fluidity and realness of the original image. The idea of going back, cutting and starting again on a few places in the story where I feel like I've overworked it is actually kind of exciting to me today.