Cartoonist Art Spiegelman was at BookPeople tonight to talk about his new book, Breakdowns. He was funny, he smoked a lot, and he couldn’t believe anyone would rather come see him when they could be at home watching the presidential debates.

Spiegelman is fascinating not because of Maus and the Pulitzer Prize—he’s fascinating because he is someone whose who life has been consumed by and obsessed with comics. The son of immigrant parents, he says he “discovered America” through comics. He has a lazy eye, which makes him see the world in 2-D. He’s spent almost every waking moment researching comics, looking up the words “comics” and “caricature” and “narrative” in any nearby encyclopedia or dictionary.

He’s a prime example of how when you look at everything in life through the lens of your obsession, you not only gain this vast, treasure trove of specialized knowledge, you gain a kind of universal knowledge as well.

It all comes through in his slide show:

He kept talking about how our brains are “hard-wired” to understand comics, so I asked him if he’d come across any specific pieces of neuroscience on the subject that he’d recommend reading. He told me cognitive psychology is a much richer place to look, and gave examples: babies recognizing a smiley face before they can recognize their mother…baby red-beaked birds preferring the caricature of their mother to their real mother—worms fed to them with red chopsticks!

While he was signing my book, my friend Sunni asked him how long he was gonna be in Texas. He said ’til 7AM the next morning. (Book tour has to be a real pain in the ass when it’s all squashed together.)

Thanks Art, for coming to Texas…hope you’ll return when you can stay longer!

Links:

• Buy Breakdowns on Amazon
• Interview with the Austin American-Statesman
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! (Installment #1)
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! (Installment #3)
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! (Installment #4)
• My other posts about Art Spiegelman

In some recent reading I ran across this hilarious passage written by Frida Kahlo to her long-time affair and lover, the photographer Nickolas Muray. In 1939, Kahlo was in Paris trying to get a show when she got sick and had no help from André Breton. She was rescued by Marcel Duchamp, who she called “a marvelous painter…who is the only one who has his feet on the earch among all this bunch of coocoo lunatic sons of bitches of the surrealists.” She goes on:

I have decided to send every thing to hell, and scram from this rotten Paris before I get nuts myself. You have no idea the kind of bitches these people are. They make me vomit. They are so damn “intelectual” and rotten that I can’t stand them any more. It is realy too much for my character. I rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas than to have anything to do with those “artistic” bitches of Paris. They sit for hours on the “cafes” warming their precious behinds, and talk without stopping about “culture” “art” “revolution” and so on and so forth, thinking themselves the gods of the world, dreaming the most fantastic nonsenses, and poisoning the air with theories and theories that never come true. Next morning, they dont have anything to eat in their houses because none of them work and they live as parasites of the bunch of rich bitches who admire their “genius” of “artists”. Shit and only shit is what they are. I never seen Diego or you, wasting their time on stupid gossip and “intelectual” discussions. that is why you are real men and not lousy “artists”. Gee weez!

Sound like anyone you know?

Read more:

• Frida Kahlo, Paris, France letter to Nickolas Muray, New York, N.Y., 1939 Feb. 16
• Frida Kahlo, Paris, France letter to Nickolas Muray, New York, N.Y., 1939 Feb. 27

Now Moleskine has their own line of reasonably-priced Moleskine City Notebooks that include nice color maps and transparent overlays that make things even easier:

Here are things we’re hoping to hit (thanks to the great cartoonist and Montrealite Matt Forsythe for some of the recs!):

• a hike up the mountain (in the middle of town) for a great view of the city
• visit to the Drawn & Quarterly bookstore (211 Bernard West)
• Art museums: Art Contemporain and Beaux Arts
• Dinner at Au Pied de Cochon
• Dinner at L’Express (a bistro) on St-Denis street
• coffee on St-Denis
• a stroll through Old Montreal
• Bagels from Saint-Viateur
• breakfast/brunch in Mile End neighbourhood
• a smoked meat sandwich from Schwartz’s

It’s been a long time since we’ve been out of Austin, let alone Texas, and this is my first visit to Canada, so we’re really excited and dusting off our French skills.

If anybody has any recommendations for things to see / do / eat while we’re there, please leave them in the comments!

A napkin doodle for our financial crisis. This was is my old man’s approach to money, and thank goodness he passed it on to me.

Read the official contest rules.

Get out your markers: this is the third of four monthly contests we’ll be running for the rest of the year. For each monthly contest, one winner and three runners-up will receive a free copy of the book, along with the chance to be published in the book!

To enter the contest, you must be 18 and a US resident (sorry to all you young’uns and overseas folk!) One entry per monthly contest.

The two columns of newspaper below are from October 1, 1908, 100 years ago. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to turn them into a poem.

[download high-quality GIF image] | [download PDF]

Directions

You can go about the creation of your poem in one of two ways:

WITH MARKER FUMES

1. Download the PDF and print it out (you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader)
2. Black out the words in the newspaper text into a poem
3. Scan or take a digital picture of the poem. Be sure it’s readable.
4. Save an image of the poem as a .jpg, .gif, or .png file less than 2MB in file size
5. Send in the file along with the required information using the submission form

WITHOUT MARKER FUMES

1. Download the high-resolution GIF and save it to your desktop (right-click save as on the link)
2. Open the GIF with an image-editing program like Paint or Photoshop
3. Black out the words in the newspaper text into a poem
4. Save an image of the poem as a .jpg, .gif, or .png file less than 2MB in file size
5. Send in the image file along with the required information using the submission form

TIPS

• Combine both columns into one poem—don’t just do each column at a time! It doesn’t make for a good read. Skip between the two…this allows for more interesting possibilities. You can see the previous winners here and here.
• Remember that Westerners read left-to-right, up-to-down. Poems read best if they follow that pattern.
• You can get around the left/right/up/down problem by connecting words with whitespace. (See an example.)
• What you are doing when making a blackout poem, in the words of Allen Ginsberg, is “shopping for images.” Nouns and verbs make the best images.
• Regardless of where it’s located in the text, I always start a poem by looking for a word or image that resonates with me and move from there.
• It’s a lot like a word search.
• You don’t have to use the whole text. What to leave in / leave out / how long is the magic.
• Poetry doesn’t have to be serious!
• Try not to think to hard about it and let it flow! It might take you a bunch of tries. Don’t be intimidated! Anyone can do it!

One winner and three runners-up will be announced at the end of the month, along with our last contest in November.

You can see the previous winners here and here.

Help us spread the word! Link to:
http://www.austinkleon.com/newspaper-blackout-poems

Good luck!

Submission form

Read the official contest rules.

Remember: only US residents 18 and older. One contest entry per month, please. Be sure to fill out all required fields and keep your image file limited to 2MB or smaller.

All entries must be submitted by October 23, 2008 (5:00 P.M. EST)

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Problems with your submission? E-mail: blackoutpoems [at] gmail [dot] com

Here’s Peter on the making of his poem:

After scanning the article a couple times, the words that stuck out for me were “revolver” and “dining room” because they reminded me of the board game Clue. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to find Professor Plum or Colonel Mustard, although I think I did check. I was searching for Mr. Green when I stumbled upon Mrs. White hanging out near the lower left hand corner. Thankfully, most of the article had to do with games and winning so I was able to tie them together.

The second co-winner is Stephanie Cheng, a third-year med student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, for her poem, “The Walrus Makes a Toast.”

Here’s Stephanie on the making of her poem:

I find myself checking the site between patients during slow clinic days. One of my favorites was “Adventures in the Batsuit” (both the original and the retooled). The allusion to Batman makes the poem so rich, providing a whole backstory on which to comment. So when I saw the words “oyster” and “steam(er)” in the newspaper text, I immediately thought of Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” and the rest of the poem fell into place from there. Because I don’t get to write a lot of non-medical stuff these days and am subsequently full of literary rust, it felt delightfully perverse to use someone else’s words and twist them to tell my own story.”

I find it fascinating that the two best poems in this month’s contest were both references to pop culture, and both poets had a similar approach to making their poems: they found a few words that recalled a strong association, and then they filled a poem in around them. That’s often the method that yields my best poems, too.

The runner-ups were Brandon Gillin of South Royalton, Vermont, and Charles Toeppe of Monroe, Michigan. (Three winners from Michigan this month! Crazy!)

Congratulations, Peter, Stephanie, Brandon, and Charles! Y’all will get your free books next September.

And a big round of applause to everyone else who entered the contest. It’s a ton of fun reading all your submissions.

If you haven’t entered yet, have no fear: there are two more contests coming up: one starting this Wednesday, October 1st, and one in November.

Whoo boy, you need to see these guys live. GREAT show. I got almost too buzzed to draw. Just solid country-tinged rock and roll. You can listen to most of their new album on myspace, but it doesn’t quite capture the energy of the live show.

I have more nice drawings from the night, but they might be used for a secret project…more to come on that.

Thanks again to the ACL folks for the tickets!

Yesterday I read this little paragraph in Roger Ebert’s response to claims that he gives out too many stars:

The only rating system that makes any sense is the Little Man of the San Franciscio Chronicle, who is seen (1) jumping out of his seat and applauding wildly; (2) sitting up happily and applauding; (3) sitting attentively; (4) asleep in his seat; or (5) gone from his seat….The blessing of the Little Man system is that it offers a true middle position, like three on a five-star scale.

So I did a little research. The Little Man was the creation of Chronicle artist Warren Goodrich in the early 40s:

On the occasion of the Little Man’s 50th birthday, Goodrich recalled it was just another assignment that he dashed off quickly, noting, “I’m surprised (it) continued.”…Goodrich, who died last year, once recalled that a woman (possibly a disgruntled actress) once hit him on the head with her umbrella and said, “I hate the Little Man!”

The woman isn’t alone. Many of the writers at the Chronicle hate The Little Man. They boo-hoo that the picture already tells the story!

The beloved icon of this newspaper’s entertainment sections is, in fact, a complete nuisance to criticism….That’s because the Little Man gives you a visual clue to what you’re about to read.

And they complain about what Ebert loves: the middle man on the scale—the man with ambiguous feelings.

[T]he message is often unclear…when he’s merely sitting in his chair, watching. Not clapping. Not jumping out of his seat and clapping. Not slumped in his seat. Not out of his seat. Just sitting there.

I suppose a comment could be made here about how people can’t handle ambiguity in their lives: they want things to be black and white, with no shades of grey. As Ebert quotes Siskel,

“What’s the first thing people ask you? Should I see this movie? They don’t want a speech on the director’s career. Thumbs up–yes. Thumbs down–no.”

In fact, the editorial staff was so bothered by the neutral middle man that they had him redesigned:

Few are aware that the L.M. was retrofitted about 10 years ago with a more benign expression. The Little Man pose in between the politely applauding and the snoozing Little Man was redesigned in a microscopic makeover: the “alert viewer” Little Man’s expressionless mouth was tweaked with a slight upturned curve, to indicate a hint of a Mona Lisa smile, suggesting a vague amusement. His raised eyebrows indicate interest but not quite approval, denoting mixed feelings. After artistic spinal fusion, he also sat up more alertly, signifying a mixed review.

All of this came after Talmudic editorial discussions about the meaning of the enigmatic No. 3 Little Man: Did his indecipherable gaze indicate intrigue or ennui? Polite diffidence or glazed-eyed apathy? As a Datebook editor noted, “He’s the middle child, and the most unmanageable.”

I say: 3 on a 1 out of 5 scale should be ambiguous and neutral. Instead, he’s upright as if he’s engaged and smiling, as if he’s liking it. His back should be against the chair:

And to be totally ambiguous, his mouth should be a straight line (or no line at all), with no eyebrows. A blank face:

An ambiguous visual calls for explanatory text! And so, the neutral man is a friend to the good critic: if the visual is ambiguous, then the reader should be more tempted to investigate the article text to get the writer’s take!

Note: this was a repost from my tumblelog. Apologies for doubling up.

The Austin City Limits folks were kind enough to give us a couple of tickets to singer/songwriter Aimee Mann’s taping last night. She played a good batch of songs—a lot of stuff off her new album, like “Freeway” and “31 Today“, and my favorite performance of the night, the absolutely fantastic “Little Tornado“…complete with spaghetti western-esque whistling!

What’s interesting about her band is that its core is her on acoustic guitar, a bass player, and a drummer, and that tight unit is augmented with 2 keyboard players that provide coloring and atmosphere—altogether I counted 8 keyboards, including a MOOG synth, and a Hammond B-3 with a gigantic Leslie speaker. (Pity the poor roadies.)

She was nervous, so she told a lot of jokes. There’s free beer at ACL tapings, so people are constantly shuffling in and out to hit the can—”there go the pee-ers.” She called the camera a “weird, one-eyed monster” and told a funny story about trying to do a song for Shrek 3, before going into “Borrowing Time.”

There was a section in the middle where she did songs from PT Anderson’s wonderful film, Magnolia, including “Save Me” and “Wake Up.” She also did a song she wrote for PTA, “Red Vines.”

Bass player Paul Bryan was really the secret weapon of the night: great backing vocals, McCartney-esque basslines…and a terrific solo on the Three Dog Night song “One.” (Used as the opening for Magnolia.)

Here’s what the studio looks like as people shuffle in:

Thanks again to Austin City Limits!

Alison’s poem did everything I think a great blackout poem should do: it totally transforms the original article into a vivid image, it reads cleanly from left to right, top to bottom, and best of all, it has a sense of humor. She was innovative with the text: dig the way she combined “struggle-ing” and “m-y.” (”Cheats” I use all the time!) Also dig the way she drew geometric shapes around the words—everything’s either a floating triangle, a circle, or a rectangle. Something worth stealing!

I asked Alison to write a little something about herself, and here’s what she sent me:

I live in the Boston area with my husband, 1 yr old son and 2 dogs. I have a long train ride to and from work everyday, and I have found that the Newspaper Blackout Poems are a great way to pass the time (though also an easy way to miss my stop!). When I first read through the August article, the task of writing a poem seemed more than a little daunting. It is one thing to use your own words, but when you have to work within the confines of pre-existing words and order it is something else entirely! After many reads I selected a few images that I thought I could work with. Once I saw that “crushed,” “roach,” and and “kitchen” were all there, my direction was set. I then just looked for the right words to pull it all together. I love that Blackout Poems are more than just a written piece of art. Because of the location of the words and how you choose to select or link them, they can also be a piece of visual art as well.

Too cool!

The also-excellent runner-ups were Josh Whitcomb of St. Paul, MN, Mark Larson of Atlanta, GA, and Tim Bakke of Minneapolis, MN. You’ll be able to see their poems, along with Alison’s, in the book!

Congrats to Alison, Josh, Mark, and Tim: y’all will get your free books next September!

And BIG THANKS to everybody who entered the contest. It was a rough article, so if you didn’t win, try this month’s! You have less than two weeks left to get your entries in: they’re due September 21, 2008 (5:00 P.M. EST).

ENTER THE SEPTEMBER NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS CONTEST